Edited by Francis G. Castles, a leading authority in the field, and bringing together an outstanding group of British, German and American scholars, it examines trends in non-social or â€˜coreâ€™ spending on public administration, defence, public order, education, economic affairs and debt financing and in the regulatory ordering of the economic sphere. The book not only opens up new areas of comparative public policy research, but also demonstrates clearly that there have been real reductions in the reach of state in some areas, although patterns of causation are more complex and varied than generally presumed by the retrenchment literature.