While India’s state-owned enterprises are widely believed to be inefficient, there is a dearth of studies that document such inefficiency on any rigorous basis. Yet, since improvement in firm efficiency is one of the basic objectives of privatization, it is important to assess whether...

India's public sector banks (PSBs) are compared unfavorably with their private sector counterparts, domestic and foreign. This comparison rests, for the most part, on financial measures of performance, and such a comparison provides much of the rationale for privatization of PSBs.In this paper,...

Even as India’s privatisation programme gathers steam, there is a perception, reflected in the pronouncements of ministers as well as in writings in the popular press, that the benefits of privatisation can be taken as axiomatic. There is little in the literature on privatisation that lends...