At the heart of the debate about public versus private in the theoretical literature than in the empirical ownership lie three questions: literature. In most cases, empirical research strongly * Does competition matter more than ownership? favors private ownership in competitive markets over a * Are state enterprises more subject to welfarestate-owned counterfactual (although construction of the reducing interventions by government than private firms counterfactual is itself a problem). Theory's ambiguity are?about ownership in monopoly markets seems better * Do state enterprises suffer more from governance justified. problems than private firms do?Since the choice confronting governments is between Even if the answers to these questions favor private state ownership and privatization rather than between ownership, the question must still be asked: Do privatization and optimality, theory has left a gap that distortions in the process of privatization mean that empirical work has tried to fill. Further research is privatized firms perform worse than state enterprises? needed. Shirley and Walsh's review found greater ambiguity about the merits of privatization and private ownership This paper-a product of Regulation and Competition Policy, Development Research Group-is part of a larger effort in the group to analyze the effects of privatization and the role of regulation and politics. Copies of the paper are available free from the World Bank,

No abstract

No abstract

International audienceThe trajectory of institutional economics changed in the 1970s when new institutional economics (NIE) began to take shape around some relative vague intuitions which eventually developed into powerful conceptual and analytical tools. The emergence of NIE is a success story by many measures: four Nobel laureates in less than 20 years, increasing penetration of mainstream journals, and significant impacts on major policy debates. This rapid acceptance is remarkable when we consider that it was divided from birth into distinct schools of thought. What will be the future of NIE? Will it be quietly absorbed by mainstream theory, or will it radically transform neoclassical economics into a new paradigm that includes institutions? To address these questions, we follow the sometimes-bumpy road to NIE's current successes and ponder the challenges that lie ahead

No abstract