Public enterprises (PE) are important players in the global economic arena. Recent empirical evidence confirms that more than 10% of the giant multinationals are government owned; that European PE successfully compete with their private counterparts in network industries such as electricity, gas...

This editorial introduction of the Special Issue of the <italic>International Review of Applied Economics</italic> on ‘Public enterprises and quality of institutions: alternatives to privatisation’ suggests some topics for a research agenda, and discusses how the papers included in the Special Issue...

To what extent have the European households benefited from the energy reforms of the last two decades in the EU? The core ingredients of change have been, in different proportions and timing across countries: privatization of formerly state-owned enterprises, unbundling of networks, market...

This paper draws and expands from a recent ex-post evaluation carried out for the European Commission aimed at assessing the long term effects produced by a sample of ten major infrastructures in the Transport and Environment sectors and interpreting the key determinants of the observed...

This study investigates employment growth in the business activities supported by the European Cohesion Policy. We examine cross-industry, cross-regional variations in a sample of fourteen manufacturing industries and seventy European regions (in Germany, Italy and Spain) and take advantage of...

This paper briefly reviews some of the empirical findings of a research team of the University of Milan on privatization in different countries. The discussed effects include: effects on consumers, tax-payers, workers, shareholders; on aggregate growth, public finance, firms’ productivity,...

Is privatization per se socially beneficial? Or do those benefits depend on the subsequent changes in the regulatory regime? In this paper, building on Vogelsang, Jones and Tandon (1994), we answer these questions by analyzing three different counterfactuals about British Telecom privatization...

Abstract This paper extends public spending-based growth theory along three directions: we assume that exogenous and constant technological progress does exist and that both population change and the ratio of government expenditure to income follow a logistic trajectory. By focusing on the...