Tracing the Privatization Movement in the U.K. and the U.S.: An Attempt to Address the Question of Industry Productivity

This paper initially parallels the work of J. Vickers and G. Yarrow (1988) in providing a brief overview of some of the more recent developments in privatization. It concentrates on the movements in Britain and in the United States in order to provide a basis for the proposed empirical research. The paper then attempts to develop a flexible functional form approach to estimate, and ultimately compare, various parameters associated with industry productivity for those industries which have undergone privatization. This is done as an attempt to address the important economic question of what are the effects of the privatization process on the relative productivity of those industries involved.