Finland s state-enterprise sector has been larger than in most countries and included several manufacturing companies. These were usually established because of a scarcity of private venture capital, with a mission to contribute to industrialisation. Some companies have now been privatised in a...

In the past two decades privatisation and liberalisation of network industries providing services of general economic interest (SGEI), have been particularly significant in the European Union. Wide variations around a common policy trend can, however, be observed across countries and sectors. We...

This paper presents new evidence about privatisation processes and their determinants from a panel of 34 countries over the 1977-99 period. The empirical analysis shows that privatisation takes place typically in wealthy and democratic countries, endowed with deep and liquid stock markets, and...

The issue of internal security has become increasingly complex over the past decades. As there is an increasing overlap between private and public provision of security, the question of how to allocate responsibility for security between the public sphere (state) and the private sphere has...

This paper examines the consequences of creating a fully competitive market in a sector previously dominated by a cost-minimising public firm. Workers in the economy are heterogeneous in their motivation to work in the sector. In line with empirical findings, our model implies that firms in the...

This paper examines the progress of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform in the People's Republic of China. After defining SOEs and considering their scope of operation within the PRC economy, the focus of the paper is on the major reform waves that followed the deterioration of SOE profitability...

In this paper we challenge the view that the oil price has lost its influence on economic activity after the mid-1980s. While we concede that typical VAR models put forward in the literature fail to identify oil price shocks that significantly affect aggregate production, we obtain clearly...