The Politics of Economic Adjustment

The Politics of Economic Adjustment PDF

Author: Richard E. Foglesong

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1989-10-11

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13:

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This study considers both the determinants of a government's choice between adjustment strategies for the transformation of mature industrial economies and how that choice affects the nature of liberal democracy.

Reforming Infrastructure

Reforming Infrastructure PDF

Author: Ioannis Nicolaos Kessides

Publisher: World Bank Publications

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13:

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Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.

Privatization

Privatization PDF

Author: Gérard Roland

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 0231141602

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The privatization of large state-owned enterprises is one of the most radical policy developments of the last quarter century. Right-wing governments have privatized in an effort to decrease the size of government, while left-wing governments have privatized either to compensate for the failures of state-owned firms or to generate revenues. In this way, privatization has spread from Europe to Latin America, from Asia to Africa, reaching its zenith with Central and Eastern Europe's transition from socialism to capitalism. In many countries state ownership has been an important tool in bringing cheap water, energy, and transport to poorer segments of the population. In other instances, it has sponsored aggressive cutbacks, corruption, and cronyism. Privatization: Successes and Failures evaluates the practices and results of privatization in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Featuring the world's leading economists and experts on privatization, this volume offers a broad and balanced analysis of specific privatization projects and uncovers some surprising trends. Partial privatization, for example, tends to be more widespread than one might think, and the effects of privatization on efficiency are generally mixed but rarely negative. Also, while privatization appears uncontroversial in competitive sectors, it becomes increasingly complex in more monopolistic sectors where good regulation is crucial. Privatization concludes with alternative frameworks for countries in Africa and other regions that seek to develop privatization policy and programs.

The Privatization of Care

The Privatization of Care PDF

Author: Pat Armstrong

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-09-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 100065060X

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Nursing homes are where some of the most vulnerable live and work. In too many homes, the conditions of work make it difficult to make care as good as it can be. For the last eight years an international team from Germany, Sweden, Norway, the UK, the US and Canada have been searching for promising practices that treat residents, families and staff with dignity and respect in ways that can also bring joy. While we did find ideas worth sharing, we also saw a disturbing trend toward privatization. Privatization is the process of moving away not only from public delivery and public payment for health services but also from a commitment to shared responsibility, democratic decision-making, and the idea that the public sector operates according to a logic of service to all. This book documents moves toward privatization in the six countries and their consequences for families, staff, residents, and, eventually, us all. None of the countries has escaped pressure from powerful forces in and outside government pushing for privatization in all its forms. However, the wide variations in the extent and nature of privatization indicate privatization is not inevitable and our research shows there are alternatives.

In the Public Interest?

In the Public Interest? PDF

Author: Brendan Martin

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13:

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State provision of public services and government management of the economy have been under relentless assault since the early 1980s. As this book shows in fascinating detail, privatization, commercialization and deregulation have become the watchwords of public sector reform worldwide. Brendan Martin charts this global phenomenon and its effects both on those working in the public sectors and on people dependent on public provision. Privatization and structural adjustment are not delivering better public services or improved economic prospects in the North or the South. What is needed, the author argues, is a new approach which transcends the outdated dichotomy of private versus public.

Privatization and Public Enterprises

Privatization and Public Enterprises PDF

Author: Mr.Richard Hemming

Publisher: International Monetary Fund

Published: 1998-09-15

Total Pages: 34

ISBN-13: 9781557750051

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This paper examines the role that privatization can play within a wider strategy designed to overcome the problems associated with public enterprises. For this purpose, privatization is defined as a transfer of ownership and control from the public to the private sector, with particular reference to asset sales. It is therefore equated with total or partial denationalization. Economic efficiency is not only the key to improving the performance of the public enterprise sector, but is also the source of other gains often attributed to privatization, in particular, its favorable budgetary impact. To public enterprises that are subject to national or international competition, privatization offers the possibility of increased productive efficiency as government financial backing is withdrawn and bankruptcy and takeover become possibilities. The admissibility and desirability of privatization, as well as what types of enterprise should be privatized, ought to be determined by similar considerations in both industrial and developing countries.

Bigger Economies, Smaller Governments

Bigger Economies, Smaller Governments PDF

Author: William Glade

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0429700644

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Privatization of large national enterprises has been the most far-reaching of Latin America's dramatic structural reforms, the objective being to underpin fiscal stability by shedding huge capital requirements. But long-term gains to the economy also depend on such factors as increased efficiency through better communications and infrastructure and