Public Ownership" on companies was the idea of which social reformer ? *
Answers
Explanation:
State ownership has characterized most market and, a fortiori, planning economies in the twentieth century. Since the rise of oil prices in the 1970s, the whole post-war model of economic development has been heavily criticized, and state-owned enterprises have not been exempted from this swing in the ideological pendulum from the structuralist to the neo-liberal end. Over the 1980s and 1990s, the initially timid progress recorded in some pioneering countries (United Kingdom, Chile, New Zealand) was matched and sometime even surpassed by new countries joining the privatization bandwagon. This article will first review the main issues in the political economy of state divestiture, exploring the influence of the nature and the seriousness of crisis; the economic goals to be met through divestiture, in particular the choice between an immediate reduction of macroeconomic imbalances and the medium-term achievement of efficiency improvements by liberalization and more effective regulation; and the relationship between political regimes and economic policies. Then it will review the challenges posed by the substitution of private to public ownership, in terms of competiton and regulatory reform as well as mechanisms of corporate governance that protect small shareholders, while also allowing management the required flexibility to pursue long-term corporate goals.