How does a government voluntarily decrease its span of control during fiscal and economic crisis? More specifically, how do governments privatize state holdings? Conventional wisdom in the public management and privatization

The paper considers how the Treuhandanstalt's legal identity as both a public and private entity helps to explain the process of privatization or creation of property by the state after 1989. I argue the agency did not easily fit within the rigid categories of the German legal system. Moreover, its hybrid status limited the degree to which individuals or groups could make use of the courts to hold the agency accountable. As neither a fully public nor fully private entity, the agency's status successfully circumvented a number of traditional forms of control that exist in both public and private agencies in Germany. As a result, privatization was defined in a very narrow neo-liberal sense despite what one would predict from the standard accounts of the German Model.