Public enterprises never disappeared in spite of several privatization waves in the last three decades. This paper offers some trends and possible rationales for their resilience. In a sample of the Forbes 2000 top corporations, as reviewed by OECD economists (Kowalski et al. 2013), we show that...

The proposal to use privatization proceeds in order to decrease public debt in Italy is criticized for several reasons. The Italian debt, now more than 133 per cent of the GDP is the outcome of fundamental fiscal unbalances, including large tax evasion. Without targeting such unbalances, the...

This paper briefly reviews some of the empirical findings of a research team of the University of Milan on privatization in different countries. The discussed effects include: effects on consumers, tax-payers, workers, shareholders; on aggregate growth, public finance, firms’ productivity,...

The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) was the largest experiment in public divestitures among capitalist economies. It had a deep impact on economic policy-making world wide, and was vastly...

This paper analyses the effects on consumers' welfare of the privatisation policy carried out in the UK since 1979. The approach we follow sees the privatisation of a State owned enterprise within the broader framework of the "policy reform" theory (Drèze and Stern, 1990). By adopting this...

This paper offers a review and discussion of the evidence concerning the underpricing and long run performance of British PIPOs (Privatisation Initial Public Offerings) between 1977-1996, i.e. from the first privatisation under a Labour Government (British Petroleum), until the last ones by a...

Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a...

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We...

This paper studies the impact of corporate ownership on residential net-of-tax electricity prices, when the ownership effect is separated from the liberalisation effect and from other drivers of change. After a discussion of a simple conceptual model, and of earlier literature, we use IEA and...

The paper considers price trends as signals for the evaluation of reforms leading to ownership or market structure changes in public services. In order to do so, we focus on a specific example: electricity prices in four countries, namely UK, France, Germany and Italy.We consider that these...