This opening chapter of the symposium takes a broad perspective on the question of privatisation. The other papers provide detailed discussions of particular sectors. There is considerable scope for further privatisation, with the particular aim of reducing sharply public sector claims on national output. Survey evidence indicates considerable opposition to further privatisations, particularly ...

This paper studies how privatising service provision (shifting control rights and contractual obligations to providers) a ects accountability. There are two main e ects. (1) Privatisation demotivates governments from investigating and responding to public demands, since providers then hold up service adaptations. (2) Privatisation demotivates the public from mobilising to pressure for service a...

Privatised utilities are typically characterised by both undervaluation and underpricing. When faced with this problem, regulators have tended to employ a market value approach to determine the regulatory asset base. This paper analyses this approach and shows that any error at privatisation is magnified and that relative errors remain entrenched forever. We suggest an alternative, i.e., the re...

Free lunches arise when benefits of public or private organizational forms are estimated without regard to the associated costs. Two forms of the free lunch fallacy are prevalent in the literature on privatisation and deregulation. First, transfers from employees and transfers associated with tax evasion are treated as if they are net gains. Second, the benefits of market discipline, arising fr...

Ph o to : R u th M as se y/ U N D P. Introduction This policy research brief draws on the findings of a UNDP-supported book, Privatization and Alternative Public Sector Reform in Sub-Saharan Africa (Bayliss and Fine, forthcoming), to analyse the effects of privatisation on the delivery of water and electricity. Its chief conclusion? Privatisation has been a widespread failure. This has hampered...

the article takes its cue from models of quantitative research applied to complementary/alternative medicine (cam) and pinpoints some innovative features in the case at issue (portugal). it goes on to outline new research scenarios moving beyond the either biomedical or cam framework.