POLICY ARENA: Privatization and Public Enterprise Reform in Developing Countries: the World Bank's Bureaucrats in Business Report. Introduction and Overview

✍ Scribed by Paul Cook; Colin Kirkpatrick

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 98 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1328(199709)9:6<843::aid-jid487>3.0.co;2-5

✦ Synopsis

In recent years, privatization rather than public enterprise reform has preoccupied the major international development institutions in their search for solutions to improve the performance of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This trend gathered momentum in the second half of the 1980s when structural adjustment lending increasingly stipulated privatization as part of its conditionality. Between 1988 and 1993, the value of privatization transaction in developing countries represented between one-third and one-half of the world total (Cook and Kirkpatrick, 1995).

However, despite the attention given to privatization, it became apparent as the decade came to an end, that the number of enterprises remaining in the public sector had not fallen signi®cantly, and furthermore, that the privatization that had occurred in developing countries had been concentrated in a small number of middle-income economies. The slow progress with privatization was widely documented in the 1980s (Cook and Kirkpatrick, 1988;