Economic Perspectives on Privatization

John Vickers and George Yarrow

Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1991, vol. 5, issue 2, 111-132

Abstract: Despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy, the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently. In the 1980s, however, programs of ownership reform were started in many developed and developing countries. Dramatic though some of these policies have been, they are likely to be overshadowed in the 1990s by even greater privatization in the reforming socialist economies. The opening sections of this paper are organized around three broad and interrelated questions. How does ownership matter for the efficiency of enterprise performance? What is the role for privatization in financing public debts and deficits? What are the distributional and political implications of privatization? Finally we examine privatization in practice in three countries: Britain, Chile, and Poland.

JEL-codes: L33 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
Note: DOI: 10.1257/jep.5.2.111
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (320)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/jep.5.2.111 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:jecper:v:5:y:1991:i:2:p:111-32

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Perspectives is currently edited by Enrico Moretti

More articles in Journal of Economic Perspectives from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().