In this paper, we study the impact of government's budget constraint on the optimal industrial policy in industries with increasing returns to scale. We show that privatization is preferred to regulation for intermediate values of the shadow cost of public funds (i.e., the Lagrange multiplier of...

Should governments in developing countries promote private ownership and deregulated prices in noncompetitive sectors? Or should they run publicly owned firms and regulate prices at the expense of rents to insiders? A theoretical model is used to answer these normative questions. The analysis...