The British privatisation programme: a long term perspective

Robert Millward ()

Departmental Working Papers from Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract: The British privatisations were concentrated on the infrastructure industries of transport, communications and energy. It is important to assess the efficiency impact in a long-term context. The Milan study goes some way towards this but even better is to compare different countries of the Western world over the whole period since 1945. A distinction is made here between 1945-73 and the 1973-95 period, which followed the oil shocks and ushered in a general phase of de-regulation and privatisation. It is suggested that factors like the reconstruction after the Second World War, the process of catch-up and convergence in technologies and the resource endowments of different countries had much bigger effects on productivity levels and growth rates in the infrastructure industries than the shift from nationalised to privatised regimes. This article also, more briefly, critically evaluates two other elements of the Milan study, the treatment of excess profits and of the move to more differentiated price structures.

Keywords: Nationalization; Privatization; Great Britain (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L32 L33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-02-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-his and nep-pbe
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2006-07

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