Agriculture and Rural Development Discussion Papers is an informal series produced by the Agriculture and Rural Development Department of the World Bank. These papers raise concepts and issues for discussion in the broader development community and describe ongoing research and/or implementation experiences from the Bank. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein are those...

Article history: Received October 15, 2011 Received in Revised form November, 14, 2011 Accepted 25 February 2012 Available online 10 March 2012 One of the most important concerns in privatization of governmental banks is to see whether there is any change on the performance of the privatized banks or not. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical investigation on some privatized ba...

We extend the current empirical literature on privatization by exploring the effect of ultimate privatization on the performance of Chinese listed companies. Ultimate privatization is defined as the incidence of transferring the ultimate control of a state-owned company from the government to private owners. Using a sample of 127 Chinese listed companies that have had controlling blocks transfe...

Much of the existing literature on social security has taken the extreme assumption that individuals have little or no altruism; this paper takes an opposite assumption that there is full two-sided altruism. When households insure members that belong to the same family line, privatizing social security can gain public support. In our benchmark model calibrated to the U.S. economy, privatization...

The idea of performance contracting or performance based contracting has become increasingly popular in the child welfare arena. This isn’t surprising, in that it comes on the heels of two very powerful shifts in the provision of child welfare services since the early 1990s: a rapid growth in privatization and the emergence of major accountability efforts from the federal government in the form...

This article analyzes why people in the United States have major problems in accessing medical care that are due to financial constraints. The author suggests that the cause of these problems is the way in which medical care and elections are funded in the United States, with private sources being the largest component in the funding of both activities. The article includes a comparison of fund...