Uganda is widely recognised as a country that has made significant achievements in implementing policy reform over the past decade. Is this because Uganda ‘owned’ the policy reforms? The government was certainly committed to policy reform, but is this ownership? This paper aims to clarify the notion of ownership of policy reform, using ‘pro-poor’ policies in Uganda as a case study. We provide a...

Private ownership should generally be preferred to public ownership when the incentives to innovate and to contain costs must be strong. In essence, this is the case for capitalism over socialism, explaining the "dynamic vitality" of free enterprise. The great economists of the 1930s and 1940s failed to see the dangers of socialism in part because they focused on the role of prices under social...

We discuss the relative merits of public and private ownership. Our starting point is the analysis of Hart, Schleifer and Vishney (HSV), who apply an incomplete contract framework to study the difference between private and public ownership. Our analysis departs from HSV’s model in two aspects. First, we allow for cost-sharing contracts between the government and the firm. Second, we assume tha...