Ongoing work to analyse a country's competitive standing has led to the application of the benchmarking method to comparative sectoral and national assessment. The method involves a comparison in terms of performance which explicitly looks for the best process, the "best practice". The use of...

The positive impact of an effective competition regime on innovative activities and economic growth is well established in empirical terms. Effective competition requires that enterprises are not restricted in their economic activities. Enterprises need to be privately owned in order to enjoy...

With a few exceptions pinpointed in the public services field where it has not been possible to set up an effective competition regime, international empirical evidence demonstrates that enterprises which have attracted investors from the private economy can (at the least) be run more...

"Competition", "liberalisation" and "privatisation" are emotive words in Austria's economic policy debate. To contribute to a less emotional discussion on the "privatisation of public assets" WIFO provides an objective and balanced analysis, not only of the advantages and opportunities of...

This second contribution to WIFO's series of articles on privatisation focuses on the analysis of the empirical evidence. It also investigates which extent of government withdrawal from state-owned enterprises would be optimal from the perspective of industrial location policy. According to the...

Liberalisation, competition and regulation constitute the most important economic prerequisites for successful privatisations, whereas the approval of the population (and its political representatives) is the main political precondition. In competitive markets privatisation no longer depends on...

Systemic Industrial and Innovation Policy as defined by Aiginger (2007, 2012, 2013) is a very well developed theoretical framework for "real world" industrial policy. SIIP differs decisively from policies of the past, and has been receiving a real-world impetus from both the EU 2020 and the EU...