Suchergebnisse

The divestiture of public enterprises has become an increasingly salient issue in Africa. Since the early 1980s, privatisation activity has occurred in most states, with major programmes in one‐third. This pattern of state restructuring has reflected both external and internal pressures, though the former have played by far the more dynamic role. Given the diverse national, class and regional interests it touches upon, divestiture remains not just technically difficult but also a politically sensitive issue for African regimes. Though privatisation programmes have faced multiple obstacles in practice, they provide an important marker as to the shifting balance which is occurring between states and private capital in Africa.

Presents the politics of privatisation of the CDU/FDP coalition, and inquires into the reasons for the government's timidity, which the neo-liberals bemoan. This is preceded by a brief description of the size and structure of the nationalised sector in the Federal Republic of Germany. (CP)

Despite repeated commitments by successive governments in Indonesia to divestment of state-owned enterprises, little has occurred. There has been considerable experimentation with a different kind of privatisation, however, involving reforms that opened up markets previously dominated by state firms to the private sector. The spectacular failure of some of these experiments has weakened the appeal of privatisation. It is argued here that these disappointments do not reflect any conceptual shortcoming of privatisation as a means of improving efficiency, but are attributable to moral hazard resulting from the failure to ensure that business risks were shifted into the private sector along with ownership.