In Eastern Europe privatization is now a mass phenomenon. The authors propose a model of it by means of an illustration from the example of Poland, which envisages the free provision of shares in formerly public undertakings to employees and consumers, and the provision of corporate finance from foreign intermediaries. One danger that emerges is that of bureaucratization. On the broader canvas, mass privatization implies the reform of the whole system, the creation of a suitable economic infrastructure for a market economy and the institutions of corporate governance. The authors point out the need for a delicate balance between evolution - which may be too slow - and design - which brings the risk of more government involvement than it is able to manage. A chapter originating as a European Bank working paper explores the banking implications of setting up a totally new financial sector with interlocking classes of assets. The economic effects merge into politics as the role of the state is investigated. Teachers and graduate students of public/private sector economies, East European affairs; advisers to bankers or commercial companies with Eastern European interests.

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.

Why our workplaces are authoritarian private governments—and why we can’t see it One in four American workers says their workplace is a “dictatorship.” Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are—private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers’ speech, clothing, and manners on the job, and employers often extend their authority to the off-duty lives of workers, who can be fired for their political speech, recreational activities, diet, and almost anything else employers care to govern. In this compelling book, Elizabeth Anderson examines why, despite all this, we continue to talk as if free markets make workers free, and she proposes a better way to think about the workplace, opening up space for discovering how workers can enjoy real freedom.

Are resources allocated more efficiently through private ownership than through the public sector? The experiences of eleven newly privatised companies are examined to evaluate this hypothesis. With the Government's pro-privatization policies in place for over a decade, this is a prime time to evaluate theory versus reality.

Privatizing Russia offers an inside look at one of the most remarkable reforms in recent history. Having started on the back burner of Russian politics in the fall of 1991, mass privatization was completed on July 1, 1994, with two thirds of the Russian industry privately owned, a rapidly rising stock market, and 40 million Russians owning company shares. The authors, all key participants in the reform effort, describe the events and the ideas driving privatization. They argue that successful reformers must recognize privatization as a process of depoliticizing firms in the face of massive opposition: making the firm responsive to market rather than political influences. The authors first review the economic theory of property rights, identifying the political influence on firms as the fundamental failure of property rights under socialism. They detail the process of coalition building and compromise that ultmately shaped privatization. The main elements of the Russian program -- corporatization, voucher use, and voucher auctions -- are described, as is the responsiveness of privatized firms to outside investors. Finally, the market values of privatized assets are assessed for indications of how much progress the country has made toward reforming its economy. In many respects, privatization has been a great success. Market concepts of property ownership and corporate management are shaking up Russian firms at a breathtaking pace, creating powerful economic and political stimuli for continuation of market reforms. At the same time, the authors caution, the political landscape remains treacherous as old-line politicians reluctantly cede their property rights and authority over firms.

Over the past decade economic policy in the UK and elsewhere has been guided by the belief that resources are used more efficiently in the private sector than under state ownership. Consequently, many formerly state-owned companies have been transferred to the private sector. After surveying the theoretical arguments for and against this hypothesis, this book examines the experience of eleven firms, including British Airways, Rolls-Royce and British Telecom. Various indicators are used to measure each firm's performance before and after privatisation to assess whether this policy has brought about improvements in efficiency. The first four chapters provide background material for the empirical work that follows. Chapter 1 outlines the theoretical arguments for and against the idea that private ownership will be more efficient than state control. Chapter 2 provides brief histories of the eleven organisations studied and chapter 3 discusses how their performance can be measured. Chapter 4 reviews the literature on the relative efficiency of public and private ownership. Chapter 5 considers the impact of privatisation on each of the eleven firms' labour and total factor productivity growth. Chapter 6 performs a similar analysis using two standard accounting ratios (value-added and the rate of profit). Chapter 7 assesses the impact of privatisation on technical efficiency using data envelopment analysis. In chapter 8 the impact of ownership on employment, wage levels and the distribution of business income is considered. The penultimate chapter discusses the restructuring that has followed each company's move into the private sector, and the final chapter summarises the results.

Examining eight case studies on the role of law in various arenas, this collection of essays addresses the reconfiguration of the relations between the state, the market, and the family caused by privatization.