State Power and Ideology in Britain: Mrs Thatcher's Privatization Programme

State-centred theory, a leading exemplar of the new institutionalism, assumes the separation of state from society and objectivity from subjectivity. This epistemological stance supports a structural analysis which holds that the state is an actor in its own right, that the state has distinctive interests, and that state capacity depends on strong institutions and weak societal opposition. Yet the case of the Thatcher governments'ideologically motivated privatization programme challenges the statists'hypotheses and epistemology. Rather, the making of British privatization policy supports the view that the way political actors form and use ideas is important in explaining state power and in defending the liberal democratic vision of mankind as the maker of history.     

Privatization and the Courts: How Judicial Structures Shaped German Privatization

This article examines how legal institutional structures shaped the process of East German privatization by the Treuhandanstalt. It argues that the courts, as an important venue for oversight and accountability, were central to achieving the rapid and narrowly defined privatization carried out by the agency. Moreover, the experience of privatization after 1989 suggests the courts played a far more important role in shaping economic policy than one would have expected from traditional scholarship on public agencies, the courts, or the German legal system.     

Privatization Revisited

Privatization encompasses an extraordinary range of activities involving the delivery of physical services, the delivery of social services, and even regulatory enforcement. When deciding whether to privatize, how to privatize, and to whom to privatize, policymakers should keep a number of criteria in mind. This paper specifies such criteria and reviews some of the evidence on privatization's effects.     

Decentralizing a Centralized State: Local Government Finance in Chile Within the Latin American Context

A major issue in Latin. America is the decentralization of public finances and the autonomy of local government. This article begins with a brief review of the ongoing decentralization debate. We then discuss key features of local government finance and autonomy among unitary and federal governments in Latin America. Against that backdrop, we focus on the Chilean case, which has been a widely celebrated success story in the economic development literature. We argue that despite major gains by municipal governments over the past two decades, financial decision making powers still rest with the national government. This creates financial complacency among local governments. To remedy this, we conclude with six proposals for promoting effective decentralization.     

Privatization and cost reduction

In this paper several examples of government contracts with private firms are examined to see how experience conforms to a principal-agent model of cost minimization via competitive bidding and how important are the many qualifications to the model. Fifteen cases of local government contracting are examined.The course of private contracting is not always smooth — as judged by the many contract disruptions observed and by the number of cities that believe they are no longer saving money by contracting and those which have resumed public production. It also seems to be the case, however, that competition generally reduces initial costs, that in many cases cost savings persist, that it is possible to stimulte competition, and that providing for continual interaction, as contrasted with simply monitoring performance, can prevent disruption.     

Privatization as institutional choice

A model based upon the common concept of rent-seeking behavior avoids an exclusive focus on the pecuniary motive in private institutions and the power motive in public institutions. Using this model, the case for privatization ranges from very strong to unpersuasive, with some fascinating intermediate cases. Where purchases are frequent, information is abundant, costs of a bad decision are small, externalities are minimal, and competition is the norm, privatization ought to be pursued. At the other extreme, in situations where externalities and collective interests abound, natural monopolies are dominant, distributional goals are important, or debate and experience will alter preferences, governmental determination of service levels and public provision should continue. Intermediate situations such as those involving education, health, and some aspects of enterprise development provide the most interesting and hotly debated areas. These intermediate situations have both private and collective characteristics, choices are made infrequently with little information, have monumental consequences, distributional considerations are critical, and public debate about the level and type of service substantially affects individual behavior.     

Privatization,information and incentives

In this paper the choice between public and private provision of goods and services is considered. In practice, both modes of operation involve significant delegation of authority, and thus appear quite similar in some respects. The argument here is that the main difference between the two modes concerns the transactions costs faced by the government when attempting to intervene in the delegated production activities. Such intervention is generally less costly under public ownership than under private ownership. The greater ease of intervention under public ownership can have its advantages; but the fact that a promise not to intervene is more credible under private production can also have beneficial incentive effects. The fundamental privatization theorem (analogous to the fundamental theorem of welfare economics) is presented, providing conditions under which government production cannot improve upon private production. The restrictiveness of these conditions is evaluated.     

Privatization and bidding in the health-care sector.

Public provision of health care, as under Medicare and Medicaid, traditionally "privatized" major production decisions. Providers of care, largely private physicians and hospitals (but also public hospitals), made significant decisions about public beneficiaries' access to care, the quality and quantity of individual services, and the prices to be paid. The result was high access and quality/quantity, but also high program spending, which has prompted a reassertion of public budgetary control. Newly activist program administration is using various mechanisms to promote economizing. Unable and unwilling to specify standards of public access or quality/quantity too overtly, administration instead seeks to squeeze prices--mainly through administrative price setting but also through competitive bidding and voucherlike arrangements. Under such new incentives, major choices that in many non-American systems would be public are here "reprivatized" to be resolved out of the limelight by beneficiaries, traditional providers, or new intermediaries like Competitive Medical Plans.     

Privatization of Municipal Wastewater Treatment

Privatization of wastewater treatment facilities was encouraged by changes in the law and in the attitude of government officials during the early 1980s The idea was for localities to benefit from the efficiency gains expected when operations were transferred from municipal administration to a profit-making organization. However, significant differences between the ideal and reality often existed, particularly when contracts all but eliminated the profit motive.     

第三条道路内的理论分歧

第三条道路宣称它既不是旧式的国家社会主义,又不是自由市场的新自由主义,而是把新自由主义者所强调的经济效率和活力与传统左派所关注的平等与社会凝聚力结合起来,这颇似一幅完整的政策框架,但实际上其内部存在着重大的理论差异,甚至是完全不同的政治工程,既有代表现代社会民主的平等思想,又有现代托利主义左派"一个民族国家"的思想.因此,所谓的第三条道路实际上是一个多元性的政策框架,这种内在的多元性特点,既有助于左派建立广泛的政治联盟,孤立主张自由市场的右派,但由于其政治观点的模棱两可又容易疏远那些希望根据明确思想而采取行动的支持者,使人担心第三条道路的生命力.     

Chinese Political Studies: Overview of the State of the Field

The range of questions of interest to scholars of Chinese politics has changed slowly over recent decades, but the depth of empirical probes to answer them has quickly improved. One reason is the rise of China-born and Chinese-American researchers. Another is greater access to local information in China after the start of reforms there. Future developments in this field are likely to enrich current American political science, which will require fresh methods for adequate study of the planet's most populous polity.     

Social Security Privatization and Market Risk

Under Social Security privatization, workers would be allowed to divert some of the money that currently goes to Social Security into private accounts. This would expose them to market risk, that is, the risk of a substantial drop in equity prices or of a prolonged bear market. This could result in generations of workers with less money than they thought they would have for retirement. Depending on a worker's birth date, if the privatization approach proposed by President Bush's Commission to Strengthen Social Security had been enacted at the start of the Social Security program, the retirement benefits generated from putting 10% of earnings in a private account for 35 years would have ranged from 100% to less than 20% relative to pre‐retirement earnings. The extraordinarily high retirement income generated from the booming 1990s stock market was the equivalent of winning the generational lottery—unlikely to be repeated regularly. Even under these beneficial circumstances, a privatized system could have cost the government more than $1 trillion in today's dollars over the past 3 decades if the government decided to help out those who accumulated too little for retirement. The primary alternative to a government bailout of the Social Security system, older workers working longer, would likely not generate the desired results. Workers wanting to work longer would create labor market pressures typically at times when unemployment is already high.     

Public Service Under Challenge in the Age of Privatization

During the second and third quarters of this century, the scope of public service expanded significantly in almost all societies irrespective of their social, economic, political, and ideological predilections. In the past, such an expansive public bureaucracy came under criticism for its various shortcomings and pathological implications. However, recently, a more serious form of assault on the public service has been introduced by the proponents of the current privatization movement. The advocacy of privatization by the dominant national and international forces has created three major forms of challenges to the public service: a challenge to its legitimacy, a challenge to its ethical standards, and a challenge to its motivational foundation. In this article, the nature and intensity of these challenges are analyzed, the claims and assumptions of privatization are reexamined, and some possible remedies are explored.     

日本企业民营化对我国政企分开的启示

为了调整政府与企业的关系,日本在20世纪80年代开始了以日本国有铁道公司、电信电话公司和烟草专卖公司民营化为标志的行政改革。此后,随着经济形势的变化,日本民营化成了行政改革的大方向。我国正在推进的政治体制改革,调整政企关系能从中得到一些启示。     

Pension Privatization: Evolution of a Paradigm

From 1981 to 2004, a paradigm shift occurred in pension systems worldwide as more than 30 countries fully or partially replaced their state‐administered pay‐as‐you‐go pension systems with ones based on individual, private savings accounts. Yet in 2005, pension privatization abruptly stopped. After the 2008 crisis, several countries that had privatized their pension systems scaled back or even canceled individual accounts. Is the new pension paradigm dead? And if so, why? This article shows that fiscal and ideational factors caused a temporary halt to pension privatization worldwide and induced transnational pension policy networks to find new ways to respond to perceived failures. Adjustments to the new pension paradigm such as emphasizing minimum pensions and recommending that governments “nudge” rather than mandate pension savings will enable pension privatization to continue in years ahead, albeit in a revised form.     

Legitimacy and the Privatization of Environmental Governance: How Non–State Market–Driven (NSMD) Governance Systems Gain Rule–Making Authority

In recent years, transnational and domestic nongovernmental organizations have created non–state market–driven (NSMD) governance systems whose purpose is to develop and implement environmentally and socially responsible management practices. Eschewing traditional state authority, these systems and their supporters have turned to the market's supply chain to create incentives and force companies to comply.
This paper develops an analytical framework designed to understand better the emergence of NSMD governance systems and the conditions under which they may gain authority to create policy. Its theoretical roots draw on pragmatic, moral, and cognitive legitimacy granting distinctions made within organizational sociology, while its empirical focus is on the case of sustainable forestry certification, arguably the most advanced case of NSMD governance globally. The paper argues that such a framework is needed to assess whether these new private governance systems might ultimately challenge existing state–centered authority and public policy–making processes, and in so doing reshape power relations within domestic and global environmental governance.