The role played by public enterprises: how much does it differ across countries?

James Schmitz

Quarterly Review, 1996, vol. 20, issue Spr, 2-15

Abstract: This article studies the extent to which governments produce goods for the market (that is, the extent of public enterprise production). It concludes that the current literature dramatically understates the role of public enterprises in many low-productivity countries. The current literature focuses on the total value of goods produced by public enterprises. This article focuses on the types of goods they produce. While the total value of goods produced by public enterprises (as a share of total output) differs a bit across countries, the types of goods they produce differ much more dramatically. In many low-productivity countries, the government produces a large share of the country's manufactured goods. In nearly all high-productivity countries, the government stays out of the manufacturing sector altogether. Therefore?and because the manufacturing sector plays a special role in economies?this article concludes that public enterprises play a very large role in many low-productivity countries.

Keywords: Industrial policy; Government-sponsored enterprises (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/QR/QR2021.pdf
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=274 (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:fip:fedmqr:y:1996:i:spr:p:2-15:n:v.20no.2

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Quarterly Review from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().