In many countries, particularly developing countries, economic reforms, especially privatization, are considered as a strategic approach. The growth of the government decreases the competition in the market, and so, some fields should be privatized in order to create the competition.  By moving towards privatization and the changes in competition methods and the presentation of the World Trade,...

BACKGROUND Township-village health centers in rural areas play an important role in health service system in China. In East China's Jiangsu Province, the City of Haimen privatized all 25 township-village health centers in 2002. This study assesses the effect of privatization on staff retention among these health centers. METHODS This is a retrospective study based on 10-year administrative da...

Contracting is often seen as a form of privatization, with contracts functioning as the tool that makes privatization possible. But contracting is also viewed by some as a means for the private sector to expand in a covert way its presence within the health sector. This article discusses the wider meaning of the term privatization in the health sector and the ways in which it is achieved. Priva...

Introduction Waiting lists in Canada have been a highly symbolic issue to people on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border. For those who support privatization of the Canadian healthcare system, the waiting lists speak to a vast lack of healthcare delivery capacity in the public system. Such lists, they argue, would be minimized by moving towards a two-tiered system of care in which the public sy...

The Department of Defense’s utility systems have suffered from under-funding and lack of technology investment, thereby creating a service gap between these DoD systems and systems operated by commercial providers. In order to overcome this gap and refurbish their systems, the DoD has focused its efforts on privatization of these systems. Although the Air Force has published source selection gu...

What is the evidence about the impact of privatization on public resources? Using home security systems as a case study and historical evaluation as a method, I reexamine the assumption that the growth of a private security industry has reduced demands of wealthier citizens on public police and the public purse. Evaluation evidence based on historical research casts serious doubt on whether the...

Sir, We read with great interest the article by Rutkowski [1] on the epidemiology of renal replacement therapy in Central and Eastern Europe. Hungary belongs to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe where private dialysis centres entered into the market at an earlier stage, in the middle of 1990s. From the point of view of the Hungarian National Health Insurance Fund Administration (the o...

The national health services (NHS) of England, Portugal, Finland and other single-payer universalist systems financed by general taxation, are based on the theoretical principle of an integrated public sector payer-provider. However, in practice one can find different forms of participation of non-public healthcare providers in those NHS, including private for profit providers, but also third s...

OBJECTIVES This study had two objectives: (1) to determine what the public health and development literature has found regarding the public health outcomes of water privatization in Latin America and (2) to evaluate whether the benefits of water privatization, if any, outweigh the equity and justice concerns that privatization raises. METHODS Using a standard set of terms to search several da...

Privatization has been the most controversial policy dominating the political agenda of many countries around the world. For instance, in the 1980s privatization were the policy choice and preferences as well as the new wave of conservative market reforms beginning in the west with the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom in 1979 and the Regan government in the United States the following ...