Download or read book The Privatization of Everything written by Donald Cohen and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book the American Prospect calls “an essential resource for future reformers on how not to govern,” by America’s leading defender of the public interest and a bestselling historian “An essential read for those who want to fight the assault on public goods and the commons.” —Naomi Klein A sweeping exposé of the ways in which private interests strip public goods of their power and diminish democracy, the hardcover edition of The Privatization of Everything elicited a wide spectrum of praise: Kirkus Reviews hailed it as “a strong, economics-based argument for restoring the boundaries between public goods and private gains,” Literary Hub featured the book on a Best Nonfiction list, calling it “a far-reaching, comprehensible, and necessary book,” and Publishers Weekly dubbed it a “persuasive takedown of the idea that the private sector knows best.” From Diane Ravitch (“an important new book about the dangers of privatization”) to Heather McGhee (“a well-researched call to action”), the rave reviews mirror the expansive nature of the book itself, covering the impact of privatization on every aspect of our lives, from water and trash collection to the justice system and the military. Cohen and Mikaelian also demonstrate how citizens can—and are—wresting back what is ours: A Montana city took back its water infrastructure after finding that they could do it better and cheaper. Colorado towns fought back well-funded campaigns to preserve telecom monopolies and hamstring public broadband. A motivated lawyer fought all the way to the Supreme Court after the state of Georgia erected privatized paywalls around its legal code. “Enlightening and sobering” (Rosanne Cash), The Privatization of Everything connects the dots across a wide range of issues and offers what Cash calls “a progressive voice with a firm eye on justice [that] can carefully parse out complex issues for those of us who take pride in citizenship.”

Download or read book Privatizing Russia written by Maxim Boycko and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1997-01-22 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privatizing Russia offers an inside look at one of the most remarkable reforms in recent history. Having started on the back burner of Russian politics in the fall of 1991, mass privatization was completed on July 1, 1994, with two thirds of the Russian industry privately owned, a rapidly rising stock market, and 40 million Russians owning company shares. The authors, all key participants in the reform effort, describe the events and the ideas driving privatization. They argue that successful reformers must recognize privatization as a process of depoliticizing firms in the face of massive opposition: making the firm responsive to market rather than political influences. The authors first review the economic theory of property rights, identifying the political influence on firms as the fundamental failure of property rights under socialism. They detail the process of coalition building and compromise that ultmately shaped privatization. The main elements of the Russian program -- corporatization, voucher use, and voucher auctions -- are described, as is the responsiveness of privatized firms to outside investors. Finally, the market values of privatized assets are assessed for indications of how much progress the country has made toward reforming its economy. In many respects, privatization has been a great success. Market concepts of property ownership and corporate management are shaking up Russian firms at a breathtaking pace, creating powerful economic and political stimuli for continuation of market reforms. At the same time, the authors caution, the political landscape remains treacherous as old-line politicians reluctantly cede their property rights and authority over firms.

Download or read book Kremlin Capitalism written by Joseph R. Blasi and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-18 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to describe Russia's massive economic transformation for an American audience, Kremlin Capitalism provides a wealth of data and analyses not previously available in this country. The authors articulate the political and economic goals of Russian privatization, examine the current ownership of the largest enterprises in Russia, and chart the serious problem of corporate governance in the new private businesses. Kremlin Capitalism is based on the only continuous study of Russian privatization throughout the Russian Federation from 1992 to the present. The authors tracked down the story of the transition in the cities, towns, and villages of fifty of Russia's eighty-nine provinces, updating their findings after the June 1996 election. The result is an up-to-the-minute report of the largest property transfer in history and an analysis of one of this century's most significant economic transformations. The volume also characterizes the position of workers in terms of unemployment, wages, union power, and their changing role as employee shareholders.What really happened when Russia privatized its economy? The Kremlin brokered the initial struggle among different interest groups eager to claim a portion of Russian property: workers, managers, the Mafia, the old Soviet bureaucracy, regular citizens, entrepreneurs, Russian banks, and foreigners. While competing with one another, all struggled to free themselves from seventy years of Communist economic culture. Four years after the process began, have large companies learned to offer goods and services profitably and pay dividends to shareholders? Individual stories come alive as the book explores problems Russians face in structuring a new economic system, defining the ownership and governance of thousands of corporations one by one. Russian economic practices are being forged in the heat of fierce political struggles between resurgent Communists and nationalists and old Soviet managers, on the one hand, and more liberal elements of its infant democratic system on the other. Whether a few big conglomerates and the powerful banks and holding companies from Soviet days will dominate the new Russian economy to the exclusion of most citizens remains to be seen.Many questions persist. How will billions of dollars of capital be raised to retool, restructure, and reorient the heart and soul of Russia's economy? Will open stock markets stimulate a new economic order or will that new order be imposed through strong state supports and subsidies? What role will be played by shadowy conglomerates that are trying to shape a disorganized economy into something resembling the old Soviet system? The authors note the paradox of a capitalism conceived, designed, implemented, and evaluated by the Kremlin when one aim of reform is to allow market forces to play freely. Kremlin Capitalism asks whether rapid privatization has catalyzed or complicated the transition to a more liberal political and economic system, a question that will reverberate for decades.

Download or read book Privatization written by Gérard Roland and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The privatization of large state-owned enterprises is one of the most radical policy developments of the last quarter century. Right-wing governments have privatized in an effort to decrease the size of government, while left-wing governments have privatized either to compensate for the failures of state-owned firms or to generate revenues. In this way, privatization has spread from Europe to Latin America, from Asia to Africa, reaching its zenith with Central and Eastern Europe's transition from socialism to capitalism. In many countries state ownership has been an important tool in bringing cheap water, energy, and transport to poorer segments of the population. In other instances, it has sponsored aggressive cutbacks, corruption, and cronyism. Privatization: Successes and Failures evaluates the practices and results of privatization in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Featuring the world's leading economists and experts on privatization, this volume offers a broad and balanced analysis of specific privatization projects and uncovers some surprising trends. Partial privatization, for example, tends to be more widespread than one might think, and the effects of privatization on efficiency are generally mixed but rarely negative. Also, while privatization appears uncontroversial in competitive sectors, it becomes increasingly complex in more monopolistic sectors where good regulation is crucial. Privatization concludes with alternative frameworks for countries in Africa and other regions that seek to develop privatization policy and programs.

Download or read book Privatization in Transition Economies written by Ira W. Lieberman and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2008 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Annotation.

Download or read book Privatization written by George K. Yarrow and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 1996 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Privatized State written by Chiara Cordelli and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why government outsourcing of public powers is making us less free Many governmental functions today—from the management of prisons and welfare offices to warfare and financial regulation—are outsourced to private entities. Education and health care are funded in part through private philanthropy rather than taxation. Can a privatized government rule legitimately? The Privatized State argues that it cannot. In this boldly provocative book, Chiara Cordelli argues that privatization constitutes a regression to a precivil condition—what philosophers centuries ago called "a state of nature." Developing a compelling case for the democratic state and its administrative apparatus, she shows how privatization reproduces the very same defects that Enlightenment thinkers attributed to the precivil condition, and which only properly constituted political institutions can overcome—defects such as provisional justice, undue dependence, and unfreedom. Cordelli advocates for constitutional limits on privatization and a more democratic system of public administration, and lays out the central responsibilities of private actors in contexts where governance is already extensively privatized. Charting a way forward, she presents a new conceptual account of political representation and novel philosophical theories of democratic authority and legitimate lawmaking. The Privatized State shows how privatization undermines the very reason political institutions exist in the first place, and advocates for a new way of administering public affairs that is more democratic and just.

Download or read book Privatizing the Land written by Ivan Szelenyi and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privatizing the Land provides an overview of reforms in the state socialist agrarian systems, especially during the 1970s and 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Using empirical evidence, the contributors provide a balanced assessment of how agrarian economies performed in different communist countries. The Soviet and Eastern European experience is contrasted with reforms in China, Vietnam and Cuba to provide the first comprehensive account of agricultural restructuring after the collapse of communism in Europe and Asia.

Download or read book The Challenges of Privatization written by Bernardo Bortolotti and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2004-03-11 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1997 to 2001, more than 4,000 privatization operations have been carried out in more than 100 countries, bringing in government revenues of over 1,362 billion dollars. The phenomenon, which grew exponentially at the end of the 1990s and then abruptly slowed down, had dramatic consequences on the performance of state-owned enterprises and a significant impact on industrialized countries, as well as emerging and less developed economies. Yet there have been surprisingly fewattempts to provide a systematic empirical account of the privatization process at the worldwide level.Why do governments privatize? Why do some countries accomplish large-scale privatization programmes, and others never privatize at all? Is privatization a trend or a cycle? Furthermore, how do governments privatize? Do governments really transfer ownership and control of state-owned enterprises or does private ownership tend to coexist with public control?This book provides some answers to these important questions trying to test research hypotheses set forth by the recent economic theory of privatization.Comprehensive cross-country empirical analyses carried out over a period of more than twenty years are used in the book to show that privatization has taken place all over the world, sometimes spontaneously, more often under the pressure of economic and budgetary constraints. Several of the goals of the privatization have been met, but despite proclamations and programmes, only a small minority of countries has carried out a genuine privatization process, completely transferring ownership ofstate-owned enterprises to the private sector. A lack of political will is to some extent at the root of this reluctance. However this reluctance can be traced back partly to structural factors that would make an orderly privatization difficult, such as the absence of developed capital markets,appropriate regulation, and suitable institutions.

Download or read book Privatising the State written by Béatrice Hibou and published by C. Hurst & Co. Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Privatisation is supposed to bring about the retreat of the state. But what happens when the state privatises itself and even its core functions - tax collection, internal security, customs - are auctioned to the highest bidder? Does this imply a weakening of the state? Or, rather, does it lead to a scrutiny and control? The contributors to this work examine these phenomena in the former Second and Third World (Central and Eastern Europe, China and other parts of Asia and Africa) highlighting the very different ways in which continuing state interference and privatisation are implemented. What we are witnessing, according to this study, is not the eclipse of the state under the impact of globalisation but the end of the relatively short era of the development state and its commanding role. privatisation does not necessarily lead to a weakening of state control; it leads to new, and often more informal, forms of interference and influence, and it is these that are the book's central theme.

Download or read book The Privatization of Education written by Antoni Verger and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Education privatization is a global phenomenon that has crystallized in countries with very different cultural, political, and economic backgrounds. In this book, the authors examine how privatization policies are being adopted and why so many countries are engaging in this type of education reform. The authors explore the contexts, key personnel, and policy initiatives that explain the worldwide advance of the private sector in education, and identify six different paths toward education privatization—as a drastic state sector reform (e.g., Chile, the U.K.), as an incremental reform (e.g., the U.S.A.), in social-democratic welfare states, as historical public-private partnerships (e.g., Netherlands, Spain), as de facto privatization in low-income countries, and privatization via disaster. Book Features: The first comprehensive, in-depth investigation of the political economy of education privatization at a global scale.An analysis of the different strategies, discourses, and agents that have contributed to advancing (and resisting) education privatization trends. An examination of the role of private corporations, policy entrepreneurs, philanthropic organizations, think-tanks, and teacher unions. “Rich in examples, careful in its analysis, important in its conclusions and recommendations for further work, this book is a vital, rigorous, up-to-date resource for education policy researchers.” —Stephen J. Ball, University College London “Few issues are as significant as is education privatization across the globe; few treatments of this issue offer both the breadth and nuanced understanding that this book does.” —Christopher Lubienski, Indiana University

Download or read book Privatizing Social Security written by Martin Feldstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume represents the most important work to date on one of the pressing policy issues of the moment: the privatization of social security. Although social security is facing enormous fiscal pressure in the face of an aging population, there has been relatively little published on the fundamentals of essential reform through privatization. Privatizing Social Security fills this void by studying the methods and problems involved in shifting from the current system to one based on mandatory saving in individual accounts. "Timely and important. . . . [Privatizing Social Security] presents a forceful case for a radical shift from the existing unfunded, pay-as-you-go single national program to a mandatory funded program with individual savings accounts. . . . An extensive analysis of how a privatized plan would work in the United States is supplemented with the experiences of five other countries that have privatized plans." —Library Journal "[A] high-powered collection of essays by top experts in the field."—Timothy Taylor, Public Interest

Download or read book Privatizing Fannie Mae Freddie Mac and the Federal Home Loan Banks written by Peter J. Wallison and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 2004 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that privatization of the government-sponsored enterprises is the only viable way to protect the taxpayers and the economy.

Download or read book Privatizing the State written by Béatrice Hibou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the new global political economy, "privatization" names a transformation of the roles of public and private actors with the goal of reforming government policies and economic aid programs. It is an objective, a slogan, a fetish. But what does it signify? On the one hand, it refers to the process of changing industries, businesses, and services from governmental or public ownership to private agencies. But privatization now also extends to what are normally the prerogatives of national states: taxation, customs, internal security, national defense, and peace negotiations. In much of the literature, privatization is associated with the retreat, decline, or even demise of the state. Using Max Weber's concept of delegation, or "discharge," as a point of departure, Hibou and the contributors of this volume propose an alternative view, interpreting the contemporary restructuring of economic and political relations in much of the world as "the privatization of the state." This book challenges received ideas about the process of globalization and its presumed homogenization by suggesting that rather than weakening the powers of the state, privatization actually strengthens it. With examples from Russia, Poland, China, Taiwan, Indonesia, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, the book questions the supposed inefficiency of states in regulating capitalism and the role economic and financial knowledge play as substitutes for political and social analysis.

Download or read book Privatizing the Economy written by Raymond M. Duch and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the 1980s government economic policies in the United States and many Western countries promoted the privatization of state-owned activities and the liberalization of competition. This has been the Reagan-Thatcher legacy to contemporary political economy. Privatizing the Economy takes a careful second look at the economic arguments that link government ownership with poor economic performance. Through a rigorous comparative analysis of telecommunications policies in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Raymond Duch shows that it is political control rather than economic ownership that accounts for variations in economic performance. He also provides a political explanation of why privatization has progressed further in some countries than others. Privatizing the Economy strikes a unique balance between economic and political theory, empirical and theoretical analysis, and cross-national and case-study research design. Having identified the weaknesses of economic arguments regarding public versus private ownership, the author proposes an alternative political explanation for the variations in the performance of public and private firms. The author seeks to explain why some governments have adopted liberal economic policies while others have not. The discussion draws upon an extensive political economy literature, pointing out weaknesses of existing theories and suggesting a novel way of looking at policy change. Evidence supporting the author's theoretical propositions comes from two distinct comparative research traditions: cross-national and case-study analyses. This novel way of looking at policy change and the author's broad use of political economy literature offers readers an understanding of what benefits liberal economic policies might deliver and of the likelihood that such policy initiatives might succeed.

Download or read book Time to Rethink Privatization in Transition Economies written by John R. Nellis and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IFC Discussion Paper No. 38.QUOTEIt is now universally acknowledged that ownership matters; that private ownership in and of itself is a major determinant of good performance in firms... Decent economic policy and well-functioning legal and administrative institutions... matter greatly as well.QUOTEThis paper looks at what happens when the shift to private ownership gets far out in front of the effort to build the institutional underpinnings of a capitalist economy. The emphasis is on what went wrong and why and what, if anything, can be done to be correct it. Proposals include renationalization and/or postponement of further privatization, both to be accompanied by measures to strengthen the managerial capacities of the state. Neither approach seems likely to produce short-term improvements. The regrettable fact is that governments that botch privatization are equally likely to botch the management of state-owned firms. In a number of Central European transition countries, privatization is living up to expectations; and there is no need for such measures. For institutionally-weak countries, the less dramatic but reasonable short-term course of action is to push ahead more slowly with case- by-case and tender privatization in cooperation with the international assistance community in hopes of producing some success stories that will lead by example.

Download or read book Privatizing Poland written by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The transition from socialism in Eastern Europe is not an isolated event, but part of a larger shift in world capitalism: the transition from Fordism to flexible (or neoliberal) capitalism. Using a blend of ethnography and economic geography, Elizabeth C. Dunn shows how management technologies like niche marketing, accounting, audit, and standardization make up flexible capitalism's unique form of labor discipline. This new form of management constitutes some workers as self-auditing, self-regulating actors who are disembedded from a social context while defining others as too entwined in social relations and unable to self-manage.Privatizing Poland examines the effects privatization has on workers' self-concepts; how changes in "personhood" relate to economic and political transitions; and how globalization and foreign capital investment affect Eastern Europe's integration into the world economy. Dunn investigates these topics through a study of workers and changing management techniques at the Alima-Gerber factory in Rzeszów, Poland, formerly a state-owned enterprise, which was privatized by the Gerber Products Company of Fremont, Michigan.Alima-Gerber instituted rigid quality control, job evaluation, and training methods, and developed sophisticated distribution techniques. The core principle underlying these goals and strategies, the author finds, is the belief that in order to produce goods for a capitalist market, workers for a capitalist enterprise must also be produced. Working side-by-side with Alima-Gerber employees, Dunn saw firsthand how the new techniques attempted to change not only the organization of production, but also the workers' identities. Her seamless, engaging narrative shows how the employees resisted, redefined, and negotiated work processes for themselves.