The Italian constitution does not mention competition. A statement in favour of an economy based on free markets could be introduced, but the European Treaties provide a sufficient integration. The Italian constitution considers the public enterprise as the remedy to excessive market power and...

Since 1989 and the regionalization of public transports in Belgium, the Société des transports intercommunaux de Bruxelles (STIB), i.e. the public operator of urban transport in Brussels, has undergone many changes, both structural and organizational. Meanwhile, the company has managed to...

A very ambitious fiscal adjustment effort is under way. Fiscal institutional and sectoral reforms have been elaborated for a more durable adjustment. Greece’s determination toward a comprehensive modernization of the health sector, beginning with a far-reaching reform of state enterprises...

This Selected Issues paper on Serbia’s Article IV Consultation reviews the precrisis growth paradigm and its legacy vulnerabilities. The underlying growth model proved vulnerable to shocks, being associated with a high share of nontradable, low domestic savings, and a fragile external...

The paper surveys the role of financial markets and fiscal institutions in the transformation process going on in Eastern and Central Europe. It highlights (a) the need to create some sort of “social ecological balance” necessary for the working of a modern market economy; (b) the need to...

Although LEEs are meant to be self-sustaining, if not revenue-generating units, many of them actually incur losses on a continuing basis. Current practice in many LGUs does not engender a clear appreciation of the true cost of the local economic enterprise. COA has documented many cases where...

Italy’s first Fascist government applied a large-scale privatization policy between 1922 and 1925. The government privatized the state monopoly of match sale, eliminated the State monopoly on life insurances, sold most of the State-owned telephone networks and services to private firms,...

This paper develops an oligopoly model with firms that may potentially be state-owned or privately owned and solves it for different cases in which the number and ownership of those firms vary. The results are then compared in terms of total surplus and consumer surplus, and this comparison...

Where general purpose governments provide a bundle of services within their boundaries, special district governments provide specific services inside the boundaries of general purpose governments. The alternative to forming a special purpose government is providing the service within a general...