The Rise of Sovereign Wealth Funds: Definition, Organization, and Governance

Bernardo Bortolotti, Veljko Fotak and William L. (Bill) Megginson

Chapter Chapter 16 in Public Private Partnerships for Infrastructure and Business Development, 2015, pp 295-318 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The economic role of governments has, of course, been evolving rapidly over the past several decades. States have always and everywhere regulated private businesses to a greater or lesser degree, but many also chose to enter business as owners. Mostly from the Great Depression onwards, governments around the world launched (or nationalized) companies that produced goods and services sold to the nation’s populaces, often under monopolistic regimes (Shleifer 1998; Megginson 2005). As these state-owned enterprises (SOEs) spread and citizens experienced the often poor quality of their output, disillusion with SOEs prompted governments to adopt a new policy of privatization. Since its introduction by Britain’s Thatcher government in the early 1980s to a then-skeptical public, privatization now appears to be accepted as a legitimate—often a core—tool of statecraft by many of the world’s over 190 national governments. Since 1977, governments around the world have raised over US$2.5 trillion by selling state-owned enterprises to private investors and corporations (Megginson 2013).

Keywords: Corporate Governance; Central Bank; Institutional Investor; Pension Fund; Hedge Fund (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-54148-2_16

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DOI: 10.1057/9781137541482_16

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