The authors of this treatise attempt to provide a deeper understanding of the economic and political transformations now taking place in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They build up a ...detailed picture of the privatization process in the retail trade, catering and more general services. Not only are these sectors strongly relevant to consumers in these countries, but they also offer attractive possibilities for property ownership on a mass scale, as well as for the fostering of the small enterprises and entrepreneurial spirit that will be so important in the future.
Dumbing Down Henrekson, Magnus; Wennström, Johan
2022, 2022-02-20
eBook
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This open access book examines the challenges and issues caused by a move to a marketized education system in Sweden. Observing the introduction of the school voucher system and a postmodern social ...constructivist view of knowledge, the move away from objective knowledge is identified as the core reason for Sweden’s current education crisis. The impact of declining education standards on the labor market is also discussed. This book highlights the issues seen in Sweden and suggests policies that can improve education in the rest of the Western world as well. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in education and labor economics.
•NHS funded hip and knee replacement admissions doubled and trebled from 1997/8.•NHS admission rates have fallen since 2007/8.•Private sector admission rates have increased since 2003/4.•Inequality ...has grown since 2003/4.•Inequality has increased fastest in the private sector since 2007/8.
Parliament has imposed duties on the government and NHS in England aimed at reducing health inequalities.
to understand the effect on inequalities of government policies, which require the NHS in England to outsource elective surgery to the private sector.
We analysed the numbers of admissions for hip and knee replacement surgery from the least and most deprived population quintiles in three time periods: before the introduction of the policies (1997/98–2002/03); following the implementation of the independent sector treatment centre programme (2003/04–2006/07); and after the extension of 'choice at referral’ (2007/08–2018/19).
despite admission rates doubling and trebling for hip and knee replacements, respectively, between 1997/98 and 2018/19, inequality grew to the detriment of the most deprived. Inequality grew at the fastest rate during period 3; admission rates to the NHS fell while admissions to the private sector continued to rise. By 2018/19 almost a third of NHS funded procedures were provided privately.
In 1997/98, for every 10 patients admitted for hip and knee surgery from the most deprived quintile, 13 and 9, respectively were admitted from the least deprived, by 2018/19 the gap had widened to 19 and 15, respectively.
Socio-economic inequalities for hip and knee replacement have widened as outsourcing of NHS treatment to the private sector has increased. The NHS must rebuild in-house capacity and provision instead of outsourcing care.
In Privatization in Turkey, Ahmet Zaifer offers a rare look on privatization in Turkey that involves all three historical periods of Turkish privatization process -1980s and 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s- ...and covers different forms of privatization from divestiture to public-private partnership.
•A mixed oligopoly is compared to a private oligopoly.•In the mixed oligopoly one public firm competes with n private firms.•Firms invest in cost-reducing research and development and receive a ...subsidy.•Privatisation reduces the optimal subsidy to research and development.•Privatisation improves welfare only when the number of firms is relatively large.
We develop a mixed oligopoly model to examine the role of R&D subsidies and evaluate the welfare effects of privatisation. In solving the oligopoly model we propose a novel use of aggregative games techniques. Our analysis reveals that privatisation reduces the optimal R&D subsidy. Furthermore, privatisation improves social welfare but only when the number of firms is sufficiently large. Implementing solely a subsidy to R&D does not lead to a ‘privatisation neutrality theorem’ or ‘irrelevance result’.
The process of selling assests and enterprises to the private sector raises questions about natural monopolies, the efficiency and equity of state-owned versus privately owned enterprises, and ...industrial policy. This comprehensive analysis of the British privatization program explores these questions both theoretically and empirically.
This paper assesses government support measures to the air transport sector following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic from two points of view. First, it explores the ...factors that shape governments’ willingness to support airlines. This is followed by a discussion on the various types of support that may be provided and how country-specific parameters influence the choice of measures. Second, it analyses the implications of government support in three dimensions relevant to air transport policy: competition and liberalisation, airline ownership and control, and environmental sustainability. The analysis suggests that most governments give a high priority to maintaining air transport connectivity in order to protect economic activity and jobs, in aviation itself and in related sectors such as tourism. The trade-off between ensuring connectivity and maintaining competition after the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenge with several political and economic dimensions. The re-orientation of public policy in the aftermath of the pandemic may limit the relative importance of the policy priorities that shaped the evolution of the air transport sector before the crisis, especially those related to climate change and the environment. The role of government and public authorities at all levels – especially the type and duration of measures affecting transport operations – will be crucial for the future development of the aviation industry.
•Support to airlines and their implications on competition, liberalisation, airline ownership, & sustainability is analysed.•A country’s willingness to support airlines and its magnitude corelate with revenue loss and dependence on international market.•It also depends on the number of domestic airlines and their employees, GDP, and airline ownership structure.•While government support has been large, it has been uneven which might distort the playing field in the future.•The market share of the main national airlines will probably become even higher, since smaller players may exit the market.•If it can be a lever to introduce stringent environmental goals, a larger government ownership can be positive.
The aim of this paper is to discuss the period of energy privatisation and liberalisation which began in the 1980s within its wider historical context. The key issues are what has been learned from ...this recent period, and how significant is it in the light of an energy transition to low carbon energy system by 2050? Energy liberalisation has led to positive and globally widespread but modest efficiency gains but a lack of clearly visible direct benefits to households in many countries. It has significantly improved the governance of monopoly utilities (via independent regulators), the prospects for competition and innovation, and the quality of policy instruments for environmental emissions control (through the emergence of trading mechanisms). We conclude that it is not liberalisation per se that will determine the movement towards a low carbon energy transition, but the willingness of societies to bear the cost, which will be significant no matter what the extent of liberalisation.
► We discuss the period of energy privatisation and liberalisation within its wider historical context. ► Energy liberalisation has led to positive but modest efficiency gains. ► Liberalisation has significantly improved regulation, competition and innovation, and emissions control. ► We conclude that liberalisation per se is not a significant energy transition.
Pension reforms undertaken by affluent OECD countries in recent decades have resulted in substantial changes in the balance of public and private pension provision, characterised as a growing ...privatisation of old‐age incomes. However, research on the political determinants of this trend remains limited. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the political determinants of pension privatisation, and to bring partisan politics back into the theoretical framework of pension reforms. The focus is on left government strength, and a distinction is made between left government historical legacy and contemporary left government strength. Time‐series cross‐sectional regressions of pension privatisation on left government strength are performed, analysing 17 OECD countries during the period 1980–2017. The results show that partisan politics matter for pension privatisation, despite structural constraints imposed by demographic and economic factors. Left government historical legacy is associated with less privatisation compared to right and/or centre government historical legacy. Left government legacy also shapes the role of contemporary politics, as contemporary left parties in government tend to privatise less in the context of historically strong left parties in government.
Reclaiming public space Bodnar, Judit
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
09/2015, Letnik:
52, Številka:
12
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Public space is partly what makes cities, and as such it has been at the core of urban studies and many disciplines ranging from sociology, geography, political science, anthropology to planning, ...architecture, design and philosophy. As one of the most multidisciplinary journals in the field, Urban Studies has been instrumental in exposing the controversies of public space during its 50 years of publication. A careful search through the archives of the journal, however, reveals that this interest has been rather uneven. While in the period before the 1990s a mere six articles dealt with aspects of public space, there has been a remarkable upsurge since then, which resulted in close to 300 articles. Somewhat paradoxically, the widely pronounced death of public space in the early 1990s thus marked the beginning of an extended debate on the topic of public space itself. This Virtual Special Issue (VSI) sets out to reinvigorate the debate once more in a critical synthesis of the important points that set the terms of the discussion and still reverberate in urban studies, by hoping to inspire new directions which touch on many disciplines. Using the death of public space as a counterpoint, the introductory article by Judit Bodnar reflects on the 'life' of public space, its cycles, forms and locations. It reviews the intellectual history of the main controversies that have kept discussions of public space alive, and further argues that attention to tensions, variations and comparisons can both reorient some of the fundamental questions of the debate itself and suggest research agendas for the future. The collection of 15 articles reflects first on the nature and specificity of public space, its historicity, its relationship to democratic politics, and then continues with the discussion of the most contested issues in the contemporary transformation of public space – privatisation, commercialisation and securitisation. Geographical diversity in the collection is not a mere gesture of politeness in a confessedly Western/Northern-dominated urban scholarship; nor is it simply driven by a desire to state that there are differences in the way public space is conceived of and operates in various places. Thinking about informality in Latin America, state and class in India, commercialisation in Vietnam, or security in other than North American 'Western' cities is meant to disrupt general urban theory and the public–private distinction.
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