POLICY ARENA: Privatization, Public Enterprise Reform and the World Bank: Has 'Bureaucrats in Business' Got It Right?

The World Bank has recently produced a spate of reports dealing with public enterprise reform and privatization. The latest is entitled Bureaucrats in Business. The underlying message that continues to emerge from these reports places emphasis on privatization as the preferred policy option. This conclusion emanates from the Bank's theoretical perspective, which seeks economic and political explanations for the superiority of private, over public, ownership and from the results of recent empirical analysis. This paper reviews and challenges the underlying assumptions made by the Bank in its theoretical work and questions the conclusions that can be derived from the Bank's empirical analysis. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.