Much has been written about Britain's trailblazing post-1970s privatization program, but the biggest privatization of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatization of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land- for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing - has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.

This book provides insights into infrastructure sector performance by focusing on the links between key indicators for utilities, and changes in ownership, regulatory agency governance, and corporate governance, among other dimensions. By linking inputs and outputs over the last 15 years, the analysis is able to uncover key determinants that have impacted performance and address why the effects of such dimensions resulted in significant changes in the performance of infrastructure service provision.

There has been much speculation about the introduction of the contract culture in the public services and its consequences for those involved (including service users). This book, which is based on original research, sets out to examine the impact of contracts in three areas of the public service: health, social services, and other government activities. These findings are set in the context of policy development for the public sector as a whole. Detailed case studies in selected areas reveal the varying different patterns that have emerged. A study of the attitudes of those involved illuminates the different perspectives of participants. In the concluding chapters the authors review the policy implications of the study and identify likely future developments.

One of the most enduring legacies of the 1980s has been the programme of privatizations that the Thatcher government set in train, and which has influenced economic policy throughout the world - most recently in Eastern Europe as it moves away from socialism towards capitalism. This book stands back and examines what has been learnt from the privatization programme mnow completed, and considers what remains to be done.

The trend towards privatization has been particularly strong in the 1980s and 1990s. In the UK, some of the most important public utilities such as telecommunications, gas, and electricity have been privatized. Following unification, Germany is having to privatize an entire economy. This book examines the form of privatization, a topic which has not previously been subjected to rigorous economic analysis, and provides a comprehensive and thorough survey of arguments both for and against it. Both positive and welfare-economic approaches to deal with the complex problems of the transition from public to private ownership are discussed. The author also examines the central issues of privatization such as why efficiency increases can be expected as a result of privatization, whether full privatization coupled with subsequent regulation is better than partial privatization with the government regulating from within the firm. He also looks at the role of trade unions in the privatization process.

Privatization has dominated industrial restructuring programs since the 1980s and continues to do so. This authoritative and accessible Handbook considers all aspects of this key issue, including: the theory of privatization; privatization in transition, developed and developing economies; as well the economic regulation of privatized industries. The studies in this volume, introduced by international experts in the field present evidence of the scope and effects of privatization, and consequently provide the basis for improving both policy formulation and implementation. However, they also emphasize that privatization is not an end in itself. It is argued that for privatization to be worthwhile and for lasting economic efficiency gains to be achieved, supporting reforms must accompany most privatization programs, particularly in the arenas of corporate governance and capital markets, product market competition, and state regulatory processes. Furthermore, several contributions demonstrate that the degree to which ownership and market liberalization can be usefully separated, and whether privatization without either competition or effective regulation is worthwhile, remain controversial issues. Furnishing the reader with a comprehensive and lively discussion of privatization in theory and practice, this Handbook will be the essential source of information for researchers in the field, and for a wide-ranging audience including public policy makers and specialists, development experts and agencies, international banks, public policy and regulation economists, and management consultants.

Latin American countries have now privatized a large number of their utility industries and make more use of market approaches to delivery through networks. Privatization has major consequences for efficiency, long-term growth, consumer welfare and income distribution but insufficient attention has been paid to the direct effect on consumers of regulation and the introduction of competition. This book assesses how reform processes can be improved, particularly in the light of experience in some Latin American and European countries. The authors address the question of infrastructure reforms in a novel way by focusing on the impact which they can have on consumers through the prices paid by different groups and on their access to the networks. They analyse original material from four Latin American countries - Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Peru - and two European countries - Spain and the UK. Access is especially relevant when considering immature systems which have not yet extended to cover the majority of the population, as is the case in many Latin American countries. The authors also address the widespread impact of privatization on the economy (via macroeconomic influences) and the more general issues of subsidies and regulation which are endemic to these industries. The book focuses on the reform of four sectors: telecommunications, electricity, gas, and water and sanitation. Academics, students, practitioners and policymakers specialising in economics, development and institutional reform will value the book's unique focus on the consumer experience of utility privatization and regulation, complemented by the rigorous case study analysis of the effects on prices and access.

An in-depth analysis of the impact of public utility privatization on ordinary consumers. This text traces the history of energy and water privatization and documents the community and consumer sectors' various attempts to influence the structure of privatization and regulation. It provides data on the energy and water utilities over the first period of privatization and shows that the benefits and costs of privatization have not been shared equally. Low income consumers have been particularly adversly affected and the regressive outcomes of privatization have undercut the gains that domestic comsumers have made in some areas of service provision. Concluding with an overview of the British experiment of energy and water privatization, the author argues that the privatization settlements reached by successive Conservative governments with the privatized utility companies are seriously flawed, and that the British model of privatization is inappropriate to the domain of essential public utility service.

Britain's privatised railways continure to provoke debate about the organisation, financing, and development of the railway system. This important book, written by Britain's leading railway historian, provides an authoritative account of the progress made by British Rail prior to privatisation, and a unique insight into its difficult role in the government's privatisation planning from 1989. Based on free access to the British Railway Board's rich archives, the book provides a comprehensive analysis of the main themes: a process of continuous organisational change; the existence of a persistent government audit; perennial investment restraints; the directive to reduce operating costs and improve productivity; a concern with financial performance, technological change, service quality, and the management of industrial relations; and the Board's ambiguous position as the Conservative government pressed home its privatisation programme. The introduction of sector management from 1982 and the 'Organising for Quality' initiative of the early 1990s, the Serpell Report on railway finances of 1983, the sale of the subsidiary businesses, the large-scale investment in the Channel Tunnel, and the obsession with safety which followed the Clapham accident of 1988, are all examined in depth. In the conclusion, the author reviews the successes and failures of the public sector, rehearses the arguments for and against integration in the railway industry, and contrasts what many have termed 'the golden age' of the mid-late 1980s, when the British Rail-government relationship was arguably at its most effective, with what has happened since 1994.

This book, written by Britain's leading railway historian, provides an authoritative account of the progress made by British Rail prior to privatisation and a unique insight into its difficult role in the government's privatisation planning from 1989. Based on privileged access to the British Railway Board's rich archives, Terry Gourvish presents a comprehensive analysis which traces the external pressures on British Rail and its own changing internal organization between 1974 and 1997.

This is the first book to use a comparative approach to examine the effects of different constitutional and legal traditions on privatization. Cosmo Graham and Tony Prosser focus on privatization in the UK and France. They suggest that the British Government was remarkably free from constitutional limitation, whereas in France the written constitution imposed important restrictions on the scope of privatization and on the arrangements of the pricing of shares. They go on to describe the links created between privatized enterprises and government by devices such a golden shares and analyse the constraints of competition law and the regulatory arrangements in Britain. They also compare the British regulatory agencies with those in the US, looking in particular at the way in which the influence of Federal and State constitutions has led to the incorporation of significant elements of openness in decision-making procedures. This detailed analysis of the effect of legal constraints on economic policy adds a constitutional dimension to what has primarily been seen as an economic issue, and will make a unique and valuable contribution to current debates in political studies.

Ziel der Autoren ist, die bisherigen internationalen Erfahrungen mit Privatisierungsprozessen in kompakter und ubersichtlicher Form zusammenzustellen und daraus adaquate Vorgehensweisen abzuleiten."

""Territory, Authority, Rights" takes up pivotal sources of friction in a process of globalization too often seen as simple and inexorable. With clarity and insight Sassen shows how the meaning of each is reconfigured in contemporary social change. Her work is essential to making sense of practical problems as well as theoretical issues."--Craig Calhoun, Social Science Research Council

"Saskia Sassen is a spectacularly original thinker. She offers us not only new concepts, but often a new vocabulary. Her central insight in "Territory, Authority, Rights," that understanding globalization actually requires focusing on the national-or more precisely, the phenomenon of 'denationalization' of many familiar domestic institutions and processes-opens the door to reimagining and retheorizing some of the most fundamental physical and political elements of our world."--Anne-Marie Slaughter, Princeton University

"In this brilliant and pioneering work, Saskia Sassen provides a whole new way of thinking about globalization and political development generally. This is a stunning achievement. One of the beauties of the book is its careful historical analysis that puts the globalizing present in the contexts of the past. However, not only is the message important, but also the author's way of illustrating the story in wonderful detail, so we are reading specifics as well as sweeping abstract ideas."--Yale H. Ferguson, Rutgers University, Newark

""Territory, Authority, Rights" is a bold new work by the leading scholar of globalization. It will undoubtedly engage the author's many fans, renewing the conversation about globalization that Sassen has shaped in such substantial ways over the pasttwenty years. But far more than merely bringing her readers up to date with her thinking, the book also represents a major new theorization of globalization. Profoundly multidisciplinary, it will reach new audiences, and in the process redefine the issues, possibilities, and theoretical stakes in globalization. Sassen responds to globalization's critics from both right and left, carving out a distinctive analytical path with critical foundations of its own. The result is persuasive and compelling--a brilliant achievement that will define the research agenda with respect to globalization for years to come."--Alfred Aman, Indiana University School of Law

On the 14th June 2017, a fire engulfed a tower block in West London, seventy-two people lost their lives and hundreds of others were left displaced and traumatised. The Grenfell Tower fire is the epicentre of a long history of violence enacted by government and corporations. On its second anniversary activists, artists and academics come together to respond, remember and recover the disaster. The Grenfell Tower fire illustrates Britain's symbolic order; the continued logic of colonialism, the disposability of working class lives, the marketisation of social provision and global austerity politics, and the negligence and malfeasance of multinational contractors. Exploring these topics and more, the contributors construct critical analysis from legal, cultural, media, community and government responses to the fire, asking whether, without remedy for multifaceted power and violence, we will ever really be 'after' Grenfell? With poetry by Ben Okri and Tony Walsh, and photographs by Parveen Ali, Sam Boal and Yolanthe Fawehinmi. With contributions from Phil Scraton, Daniel Renwick, Nadine El-Enany, Sarah Keenan, Gracie Mae Bradley and The Radical Housing Network.

The late Honourable Michael Wilson was a Canadian politician and business professional. As Minister of Finance under Brian Mulroney, Wilson was one of the key negotiators of the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement - one of Canada's most important economic agreements in the last 50 years, later superseded by NAFTA. In addition, Wilson was responsible for implementing the controversial Goods and Services Tax (GST), which remains key to the federal government today. After his life in Parliament, Wilson served as Ambassador to the United States and Chancellor of the University of Toronto. Outside of politics, Wilson was active in raising awareness of mental health issues following the traumatic loss of his son, Cameron, to suicide. Devoting considerable time to advocacy, he established the Cameron Parker Holcombe Wilson Chair in Depression Studies at the University of Toronto and served as Board Chair for the Mental Health Commission of Canada. Something within Me highlights how Wilson's personal life blended with his political life and accomplishments, detailing his advocacy for mental health awareness as well his involvement in important pieces of legislation that made significant impacts in Canadian political and economic history. These deeply personal stories, particularly those of a father grappling with his son's illness and death, remind us of the lives behind the political personas that shape our world.

From 1978 through the turn of the century, China was transformed from a state-owned economy into a predominantly private economy. This fundamental change took place under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which has been ideologically and politically predisposed to suppress private ownership. In Dancing with the Devil, Yi-min Lin explains how and why such a paradoxical reality came about. He shows that private ownership became a necessary evil for the CCP because the public sector was increasingly unable to address two essential concerns for regime survival: employment and revenue. Focusing on political actors as major change agents, Lin examines how their self-interested behavior led to the decline of public ownership in the context of China's evolving demographics and fiscal system. The constraints and incentives associated with these factors help explain CCP leaders' initial decision to allow limited private economic activities at the outset of reform. They also shed light on the ballooning opportunism among lower officials, which undermined the vitality of public enterprises. Furthermore, they hold a key to understanding the timing of the massive privatization in the late 1990s, as well as its tempo and spread thereafter. Dancing with the Devil illustrates how the driving forces developed and played out in these intertwined episodes of the story. In so doing, it offers new insights into the mechanisms of China's economic transformation and enriches theories of institutional change.

The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise. A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers. Coopersmith's narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.

Everyday life in China is increasingly shaped by a novel mix of neoliberal and socialist elements, of individual choices and state objectives. This combination of self-determination and socialism from afar has incited profound changes in the ways individuals think and act in different spheres of society. Covering a vast range of daily life from homeowner organizations and the users of Internet cafes to self-directed professionals and informed consumers the essays in Privatizing China create a compelling picture of the burgeoning awareness of self-governing within the postsocialist context.

The introduction by Aihwa Ong and Li Zhang presents assemblage as a concept for studying China as a unique postsocialist society created through interactions with global forms. The authors conduct their ethnographic fieldwork in a spectrum of domains family, community, real estate, business, taxation, politics, labor, health, professions, religion, and consumption that are infiltrated by new techniques of the self and yet also regulated by broader socialist norms. Privatizing China gives readers a grounded, fine-grained intimacy with the variety and complexity of everyday conduct in China's turbulent transformation."

Although China's centrally planned economy is a little more than a shadow of its former self, the closely inter-linked reforms of the enterprise and banking sectors are still incomplete. The relative size of the state-owned enterprise sector has been much reduced, however, the sector remains the dominant borrower from the banking system and is responsible for the majority of bank non-performing assets. Thus in the interests of financial stability it is crucial to implement the remaining reform agenda. The accession to the WTO has also made it more urgent for China's most-dynamic state-owned enterprises and her banking industry to compete through innovation, continuing process upgrades, and active pursuit of strategies aimed at succeeding in global markets. In order to do so, not only do large state-owned industrial enterprises need to be privatized, but the government also needs to create the conditions that will result in market determined consolidation of small and medium size firms into entities with a core strength. 'Under New Ownership' explores the effects of ownership reform in China on the performance of reformed industrial state-owned enterprises, and proposes privatization as a course of action to truly transform these enterprises into world class firms which compete on the basis of sound strategy, effective organization, and innovation. It draws upon newly collected firm level survey data to assess changes in the ownership structure of state enterprises on management, governance, innovation, and performance relative to other types of firms in China. This title provides researchers, students, and policymakers interested in the Chinese economy with in depth information and analysis on key issues related to the reform of state-owned enterprises.

Over the years, the term 'private sector development' has been misunderstood and misconstrued-variously vilified and sanctified. During the decade of the 1990s, the role of the private sector in economic development received increasing attention, with controversy surrounding such issues as privatization and corporate scandals. 'The Private Sector in Development: Entrepreneurship, Regulation, and Competitive Disciplines' provides the first comprehensive treatment of the topic. Central to the discussion is the design of public policy that promotes an appropriate balance between competition and regulation. This book places special emphasis on the means by which private initiative is channeled into socially useful directions, particularly job creation and basic service delivery for good people. Finally, there is discussion of the implications of private sector involvement for policies of development institutions. Written principally for policy makers and their advisers, 'The Private Sector in Development' thoroughly explores the challenges inherent in creating public policy that encourages and enhances the development role of the private sector.

This provocative report examines the trend toward competitive contracting of government functions. By focusing on four jurisdictions that hired private firms to handle welfare-to-work services, The Welfare Marketplace reveals the ways in which increased contracting with the private and nonprofit sectors is changing the role and capacity of government, threatening accountability and responsiveness to groups with special needs. Encouraging improved performance through market mechanisms creates particular challenges for the nonprofits who must balance their missions with the bottom line. The organization of service delivery to welfare clients has undergone significant restructuring as a result of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, which encouraged states to contract with outside companies and for the first time allowed them to determine eligibility for welfare benefits. Seeking to assess the impact of this development, M. Bryna Sanger studied the competitive contract environment in San Diego, Milwaukee, New York, and Houston. Interviewing contracters, public officials, opinion leaders, and researchers revealed the comparative advantages of a variety of key players in the multi-sector service industry. Sanger's conclusions paint a complex picture of how competitive contracting arrangements have changed the ways vendors and government agencies serve their clients. While performance and innovation have improved in some cases, all the players are finding that adequate accountability and contract monitoring are more difficult and expensive than anticipated. Both for profits and nonprofits are quickly draining talent and capacity as they compete for experienced executives from government and from each other. Sanger argues that competitive contracting is here to stay, but it will require more -not less -government management and oversight. She urges scholars and practitioners to develop a more nuanced and sophisticated set of expectations about the costs and benefits of increased market arrangements for service delivery, especially when serving vulnerable populations.

Capitalism has long been idealized as a symbol of success, power, and free enterprise. In reality, while capitalism has brought wealth and success to some people, many others are rapidly losing opportunities to make a living as globalization transfers more and more control over local resources to distant powers. Today there is a growing sense that something is wrong with a system that treats people as mere components of the production process, focusing on efficiency to such extremes that services to citizens of even wealthy nations are neglected. The eleven anthropologists, economists, and researchers represented in this volume address this disparity of global capitalism and offer surprising solutions to the present effects of the burgeoning "global marketplace" on some of today's struggling communities. The essays, ranging in subject matter from the preservation of traditional fishing communities in New England to the effects of NAFTA, emphasize the need to reestablish grassroots development and locally focused use of resources and champion the concerns of contemporary poor and working-class people. In its consideration of possible alternatives to the profoundly damaging effects of uncontrolled global capitalism, "Communities and Capital" offers a new perspective that balances the power and success of capitalism with a recognition of its costs.

Today, nearly all public services -- from schools and hospitals to prisons, fire departments, and sanitation -- are considered fair game for privatization. Proponents argue that private firms responding to competitive market pressures will provide better service at lower cost. While this assertion has caused much controversy, the debate has consisted mainly of impassioned defenses of entrenched positions on all sides.

You Don't Always Get What You Pay For changes the contours of this debate. Elliott D. Sclar offers a balanced look at the pitfalls and promises of public sector privatization in the United States. Describing the underlying economic dynamics of how public agencies and private organizations actually work together, he provides a rigorous analysis of the assumptions behind the case for privatization.

The competitive-market model may seem appealing, but Sclar warns that it does not address the complex reality of contracting for government services. Using specific examples such as mail service and urban transportation, he shows that, in an ironic twist, privatization does not shrink government -- the broader goal of many of its own champions. He also demonstrates that there is more to consider in providing these services than trying to achieve efficiency; there are issues such as equity and access that cannot be ignored.

For a variety of reasons market-oriented improvement efforts are becoming increasingly visible on the educational reform landscape. In particular, privatization strategies, such as vouchers and contracting out, are receiving considerable attention at all levels of educational governance and administration. Our objective in this volume is to help the educational community develop a deeper understanding of the privatization movement in general and the major pathways to privatization in particular.