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Journal Article
Social Security and Medicare: no free lunch
Report
The literature on privatization
The privatization literature focuses on three related areas: productive efficiency, the government budget, and privatization techniques. Where competitive product and capital markets exist, privatization is likely to improve productive efficiency. Such improvement makes possible fiscal gains, which may also be derived from reductions in government largess. These conclusions are weakly supported by an empirical literature that is often plagued by ambiguous results. The techniques literature provides policy guidelines for achieving the maximum benefits from privatization under a variety of ...
Report
Privatization's impact on private productivity: the case of Brazilian iron ore
A major motivation for the wave of privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the last twenty years was a belief that privatization would increase economic efficiency. There are now many studies showing most privatizations achieved this goal. Our theme is that the productivity gains from privatization are much more general and widespread than has typically been recognized in this literature. In assessing the productivity gains from privatization, the literature has only examined the productivity gains accruing at the privatized SOEs. But privatization may have significant impact on ...
Journal Article
Review essay on \"Privatopia\" and the Public Good by Evan McKenzie, 1994
In Privatopia, Evan McKenzie documents the history and legal structure of common interest developments, a form of residential community organization. McKenzie also looks at possible explanations for the rising popularity of these organizations despite the fact that their governing associations may impose more onerous restrictions on residents' behavior than municipal governments do. In this essay, the reviewer discusses McKenzie's explanations and adds his own based on an appreciation of the underlying economic forces that have shaped these types of communities. The reviewer concludes that ...
Journal Article
Examining social security privatization in Latin America
Journal Article
Sidebar : the privatization wave
Journal Article
Privatization and the transition to a market economy
The Chinese government has announced its intention to privatize thousands of state-owned enterprises. Such an effort would dwarf recent privatizations in the industrialized West and be comparable only to the Eastern European experience following the fall of the Soviet Union. As such, an examination of the Eastern European privatization may provide valuable lessons for China and any other developing economy that embarks upon a large-scale privatization program. In this article, Jason Saving considers three problems with which Eastern European privatizations have had to contend: a scarcity of ...
Journal Article
Fiscal pressures and the privatization of local services
The privatization movement appears to have lost some momentum in the United States over the 1990s. Although local governments continue to look for ways to deliver services more efficiently by using private contractors, the pace at which they are issuing contracts has slowed. In part, the trends may reflect political realities. Public employees naturally are concerned about losing their jobs, and they constitute a sizable share of the electorate. The limited role of outside contractors may also reflect economic pragmatism, especially in the face of greater scrutiny of past efforts to privatize ...
Journal Article
Privatization of local public services: lessons for New England
As governments consider ways to provide public services more efficiently, privatization can seem like an attractive option. Yet the subject engenders sharp controversies. In New England, local governments generally have not engaged in as much privatization as those in other parts of the country. ; This article examines the evidence on the relative merits of privatizing public services and attempts to determine whether these costs and benefits actually appear to explain local government behavior throughout the United States. The limited scope of privatization by New England local governments ...