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Decades of conservative attempts to scale back Social Security and Medicare, by limiting the program's universality through means testing and drastic benefit cuts, have failed. Thus, after numerous unsuccessful attempts at dismantling the U.S.'s universal old-age welfare state, or even meaningfully restraining its growth, conservative critics have developed a new approach. They are wrapping promarket 'privatization' policy proposals in the popular universal framework of Social Security and Medicare. What is fundamentally different about privatization is that it embraces (or at least acquiesces to) key aspects of universalism, including broad-based eligibility and benefits that 'maintain accustomed standards of living,' which leave universal programs with rock-hard public support. Proponents argue privatization will 'save' these programs. What distinguishes this approach from past retrenchment efforts is that promarket privatization policies, while supporting key universal tenets, will retrench Social Security's and Medicare's redistributive facets. Instead of limiting the most popular features of universalism, privatization proposals limit the redistributive elements of our large social insurance programs. Key Words: Social Security, Reform, Privatization

Summary. Although privatisation policies have become extremely popular all over the developing world, there is still only scanty empirical evidence concerning the strengths and weaknesses of different organisational arrangements in service provision or concerning the overall impact of privatisation policies in specific sectors. In this paper, the socioeconomic performance of private modes of solid waste collection are contrasted with that of public modes of service delivery, using material from two different cities, Accra and Hyderabad. Although the forms of privatisation are quite distinct, there are a number of striking similarities in outcome. At the same time, the two cases demonstrate clearly that the dynamics of privatisation policies can only be understood within their particular societal context.

This article discusses and illustrates organizational changes as initiated by ownership transition. It develops and elaborates three different pathways that organizations might follow through the process of transformation from government departments to state-owned enterprises, and then to privately-owned companies: the incremental, radical and reductive pathways. The research reported here is based on 11 case studies of New Zealand privatized companies. The pathway approach develops and extends existing models of transitional organizational trajectories, emphasizing the importance of antecedent conditions of organizational development, current environmental patterns and the strategic choices of the government and new owners.

Are private firms more efficient than public ones? Does privatisation improve performance? In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to disentangle the impact of ownership and competition upon business performance. This paper presents empirical evidence relating to the hypothesis that public ownership and competition are determinants of firms' productivity. It concludes that public ownership has a significant negative effect on productivity and also that privatisation has a positive impact on efficiency. Furthermore, increased competition is found to have a positive effect on productivity. These results are interpreted as confirming that privatisation is effective as a means of increasing firms' efficiency, at least in a non-regulated and relatively competitive sector, such as manufacturing.

A method is presented for assessing the effects of organizational change, specifically the feasibility and desirability of privatization, and is applied to British Rail's history as an illustration.

This paper provides systematic evidence for both the cross-country and sector-independent validation of political-economic theories used to explain changes in national property rights arrangements. A political-economic model for privatization will be developed and then tested on progress in large-scale and small-scale privatizations in 14 Central and Eastern European transition economies between 1994 and 2000. It will be proven that divergent levels of progress in large-scale privatization can be explained to a large extent by the structural and financial constraints on political decision-makers and varying national interest group constellations. Small-scale privatization is not significantly determined by political constraints and interest group pressure. This finding supports the assumption that the relative merits of different theories to explain changes in property rights arrangements depend crucially on the specific conditions of initial property arrangements.

Timing the formation of a small business is identified as a predictor of its success. Data are drawn from two New Zealand firms spun off from federal service agencies. The firm that formed while the agency's demise was apparent but not concluded survived the transition, while the one that formed after the agency closed did not.

This article examines the long term impacts of Bolivia's partial privatization of state-owned enterprises, known as capitalization. Despite attempting to introduce an innovative social component to distribute the benefits of privatization to Bolivian citizens, the lack of an adequate government regulatory structure meant that capitalization was unable to meet most of its objectives. While foreign direct investment rose between 1995 and 2000, these investments created few jobs and the taxes paid by the privatized companies failed to replace the revenue they had previously provided to the government. Capitalization has not reduced corruption but, rather, shifted the locus of rent seeking from the public to the private sector. The perception of the privatization of public resources led to increased social protest and political instability. The cycle of protests culminated with the resignation of the president in October 2003 following protests that left over 70 civilians dead. Rather than create a climate favorable for free markets, capitalization served as a catalyst to mobilize popular protest against neoliberal restructuring and may threaten the neoliberal economic policies in Bolivia in the coming years.

In Russia and elsewhere, proponents of rapid, mass privatization of state-owned enterprises (ourselves among them) hoped that the profit incentives unleashed by privatization would soon revive faltering, centrally planned economies. In Russia, the revival didn't happen. We offer here some partial explanations. First, mass privatization is likely to lead to massive self-dealing by managers and controlling shareholders unless (implausibly in the initial transition from central planning to markets) a country has a good infrastructure for controlling self-dealing. Russia accelerated the self-dealing process by selling control of its largest enterprises cheaply to crooks, who transferred their skimming talents to the enterprises they acquired, and used their wealth to further corrupt the government and block reforms that might constrain their actions. Second, profit incentives to restructure privatized businesses and create new ones can be swamped by the burden on business imposed by a combination of (among other things) a punitive tax system, official corruption, organized crime, and an unfriendly bureaucracy. Third, while self-dealing will still occur (though perhaps to a lesser extents, if state enterprises aren't privatized, since self-dealing accompanies privatization, it politically discredits privatization as a reform strategy and can undercut longer-term reforms. A principal lesson: developing the institutions to control self-dealing is central to successful privatization of large firms., I. INTRODUCTION Rapid mass privatization of state-owned enterprises in formerly centrally planned economies hasn't turned out the way its creators hoped, in Russia or elsewhere. When Russian mass privatization began […]

The pricing of Initial public offerings of state-owned companies is discussed, based on data from Canada, France, Hungary, Japan, Malaysia, Poland, Thailand and the United Kingdom. Topics include the privatization process, the theory of initial offer prices, empirical tests, and initial privatization returns.