Privatization in Transition Countries: Lessons From the First Decade


Book Description

The authors' view is that any privatisation is better than none, regardless of whether a stable, competitive environment has been established first. However, private companies started from scratch perform best, followed by newly privatised firms run by outsiders, either local or foreign. Privatised companies dominated by insiders do less well, but even they regularly outperform state enterprises. Without an appropriate market environment though, managers may spend more time lobbying the government for support than undertaking painful restructuring measures.




Reforming Infrastructure


Book Description

Electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, railways, and water supply, are often vertically and horizontally integrated state monopolies. This results in weak services, especially in developing and transition economies, and for poor people. Common problems include low productivity, high costs, bad quality, insufficient revenue, and investment shortfalls. Many countries over the past two decades have restructured, privatized and regulated their infrastructure. This report identifies the challenges involved in this massive policy redirection. It also assesses the outcomes of these changes, as well as their distributional consequences for poor households and other disadvantaged groups. It recommends directions for future reforms and research to improve infrastructure performance, identifying pricing policies that strike a balance between economic efficiency and social equity, suggesting rules governing access to bottleneck infrastructure facilities, and proposing ways to increase poor people's access to these crucial services.




Privatization


Book Description

Governance, as defined by the World Bank in its 1992 report, Governance and Development, is the manner in which power is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources for development. The report deemed it is within the Bank's mandate to focus on the following: -the process by which authority is exercised in the management of a country's economic and social resources -the capacity of governments to design, formulate, and implement policies and discharge functions. Also available: Governance: The World Bank's Experience (ISBN 0-8213-2804-2) Stock No. 12804.










Privatisation in Developing Countries


Book Description

In the last decades of the 20th century, privatization has been a key policy instrument in the move to more market-based economic systems in all parts of the developing world. Privatization, however, has not necessarily been accompanied by an increase in market competition. Many public utilities have been privatized as monopolies and in addition regulatory systems have been developed to restrict their market power and protect the interests of consumers. This volume brings together a collection of papers that provide theoretical and empirical insights into privatization and regulation, as well as policy perspectives in relation to developing countries.




Privatizing Social Security


Book Description

This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts. "Timely and important. . . . [Privatizing Social Security] presents a forceful case for a radical shift from the existing unfunded, pay-as-you-go single national program to a mandatory funded program with individual savings accounts. . . . An extensive analysis of how a privatized plan would work in the United States is supplemented with the experiences of five other countries that have privatized plans." —Library Journal "[A] high-powered collection of essays by top experts in the field."—Timothy Taylor, Public Interest




Privatisation and Structural Change in Transition Economies


Book Description

Privatisation and Structural Change in Transition Economies brings together specialists from different areas (governance, regulation, macro-econometrics, micro-econometrics, enterprise culture, foreign direct investment, technology transfer) to focus on the many different aspects of the privatization process in transition economies. The book does not dwell on the administrative or procedural aspects of privatisation. Instead it attempts to understand the bigger picture in terms of underlying policy environment and supporting legal and economic measures which helped to a large extent to determine the eventual success or failure of privatization programmes.




Privatization in Latin America


Book Description

This publication examines the empirical evidence on the privatisation measures introduced in the Latin American region since the 1980s, in light of recent criticisms of the record of privatisation and allegations of corruption, abuse of market power and neglect of the poor. It includes case studies on the privatisation debate in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru; and sets out recommendations for future reforms.




Privatization in Transition Countries: Lessons From the First Decade


Book Description

A decade ago, with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the start of market-oriented reforms in many former socialist economies of Central andEastern Europe, the prospect of privatizing inefficient state-ownedcompanies figured prominently in both popular and academic writings. As the headline event symbolizing change from central planning to capitalism, privatization seemed to promise an end to the inefficienciesof central planning - the key to freeing the resources and talents of this huge area and lifting its living standards to those of the industrial countries. What broad lessons were learned from the experienceof the past ten years? Along with their successes, prominent failureshave also marked this recent history, especially in Russia and in othercountries of the former Soviet Union. The overall task ahead thus remains vast if the original vision of greater freedom and higher livingstandards is to be realized.