Public enterprises never disappeared in spite of several privatization waves in the last three decades. This paper offers some trends and possible rationales for their resilience. In a sample of the Forbes 2000 top corporations, as reviewed by OECD economists (Kowalski et al. 2013), we show that...

The proposal to use privatization proceeds in order to decrease public debt in Italy is criticized for several reasons. The Italian debt, now more than 133 per cent of the GDP is the outcome of fundamental fiscal unbalances, including large tax evasion. Without targeting such unbalances, the...