Economics Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Privatization: Privatization in economics involves shifting control, ownership, or management of public assets or services to private entities. This transition aims to enhance efficiency, foster competition, and potentially improve services by introducing private sector participation. It often includes the sale or transfer of state-owned enterprises, infrastructure, or utilities to private ownership or operation. See also Public private partnership, Competition, Efficiency, Infrastructure, Bureaucracy._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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J. Donald Moon on Privatization - Dictionary of Arguments
Gaus I 213 Privatization/welfare state/Moon: It is important to stress that state provision is not necessarily superior to private provision. Even if there are clear examples of 'market failures' , areas in which voluntary provision is incapable of providing an optimal level of services of one sort or another, it does not follow that government action will be superior. Just as real-world markets are subject to market failure, so real-world governments are subject to non-market failure. >Market failure, >State provision/Moon, >Adverse selection/Barr. The recognition that public provision can involve greater costs than voluntary programmes has led to calls for 'privatization' of some welfare state activities during the past 20 or 25 years. Different groups have advocated devolving to private parties those activities once performed by the state, ranging from the sale of nationalized industries to contracting with private firms to provide public services, such as running schools or supplying cleaning services to a government bureaucracy. In a similar vein, recent years have seen efforts to increase choice and simulate market processes within public programmes, such as the use of vouchers in public education, or the 'internal market' in Britain's National Health Service. In all of these initiatives, the hope is to increase efficiency, to make service providers more responsive to clients, and to enable people to receive more individualized services, reflecting their specific needs and interests. Problems: On the other hand, these developments raise the concern that even 'quasi-market' choice in areas such as pensions or education will adversely affect disadvantaged groups. For example, when the successful school in a system relying upon vouchers or other 'parental choice' mechanisms is able to attract more students than it has space for, the fear is that it may Gaus I 214 respond by excluding 'problem' children, possibly leaving them even worse off than before. Whether the issue is pensions, education, health care, or other areas of the welfare state, efficiency arguments for public versus private provision involve a balancing of their relative costs. * * For an excellent range of studies of the 'revolution in social policy' created by the move to 'quasi-markets' in a variety of policy areas and countries, see Bartlett, Roberts and Le Grand (1998)(1). 1. Bartlett, Will, Jennifer Roberts and Julian Le Grand, eds (1998) A Revolution in Social Policy: Quasi-Market Reforms in the 1990s. Bristol: Policy. Moon, J. Donald 2004. „The Political Theory of the Welfare State“. In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications_____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Moon, J. Donald Gaus I Gerald F. Gaus Chandran Kukathas Handbook of Political Theory London 2004 |
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