The general theme of coping with financial austerity has been prominent in thinking about the future of public higher education over the last two decades. Such thinking is often accompanied by a related theme in the future of public services generally—that of privatization. The generally tight fiscal environment for public services, including higher education, has not relaxed and, in many count...

One of the central conservation debates over the last quarter of a century has been the effect of conservation initiatives on local livelihoods. Most recently, numerous negative evaluations have been made of both coercive top-down approaches to management of protected areas, which were dominant before the 1980s and focused on enforcement of protection, and efforts to decentralize governance and...

We investigate the effect of multimarket contacts on the privatization policy in mixed duopoly with price competition. There are two markets, one of which is served solely by the state-owned public firm, and the other is served by both public and private firms. Two markets are linked by the production technology of the public firm. In the general model, we first show that privatization is never...

This paper attempts to draw a synthetic picture of corporate governance in transition with emphasis on the efficiency implications of corporate governance, taking into account a) the heterogeneity of managerial skills, b) the diversity of restructuring tasks and financial situations of firms and c) political constraints. The focus is on the efficiency effects generated by the different kinds of...

Departing from the self-portrayal of the private security business as a normal, non-political sector at the service of states and other legitimate clients, this article argues that the rise of the private security business reinforces general trends towards techno-managerial, de-politicized, and militarized security practices. Even when firms behave by their own books, security privatization rec...

Network industries are often organized as vertically integrated public monopolies. Recent trends indicate the participation of the private sector. Developing and transition economies need to establish adequate regulatory policies and institutions to provide incentives for private sector participation and to protect public interests. New regulatory policies entail the creation of market competit...

Despite the growing importance of privatization in economic reform programs, little is known about its empirical effects on wages. Using individual-level data from Mexico, I estimate the effects of privatization on industry wages in four cases: the commercial airlines, Teléfonos de México, Siderúrgica Mexicana, and the commercial banks. I find that: (1) privatization is associated with statisti...

With the sequencing of the human genome comes the promise of advances in medical science. For this promise to be fully realized, researchers must have access to information resulting from this landmark endeavor as well as from subsequent research initiatives. However, because genomic sequences are potential sources of profit for the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, many private comp...

This paper proposes a multicriteria model for assessing public bus operation systems based on the ELECTRE method in the city of Eskisehir, Turkey. In this specific problem, public and expert opinions towards the privatization of urban bus lines were collected through a comprehensive survey to determine the best operation system; either by the local authority or private operators. The data colle...

In Sub-Saharan Africa private voluntary health care providers are mostly Church-related or social not for profit organizations. They provide between 40% and 60% of health care services. In the context of Health Care Reforms, the World Bank and others have (re)discovered these non governmental providers. The World Bank document 'Better Health for Africa', promotes prominent roles for them in the...