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Why Do Governments Divest?

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A review of the past 40 years reveals that economic policymaking has been profoundly influenced by two major phenomena. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Keynesian "revolution" made its debut on the stage of economic policy and determined the actions of policymakers in the Western world. The last two decades of the past millennium intum were influenced by the phenomenon of privatization. While the application of Keynesian ideas to economic policymaking was based on fundamentally new insights into the workings of national economies, privatization lacks such new insights but instead reverts back to "old" and largely neoclassical principles. However, despite the lack of a new theoretical framework, the policy implications and the scope ofthe current privatization wave exceed even that ofthe Keynesian revolution, since it is not limited to western countries alone but is on the policy agenda of practically every government in the world.
I was first exposed to policy issues of privatization in 1990, when I had the opportunity to work with Jeffrey Sachs in Poland during the country's first year of economic transformation and liberalization. Since then I have been involved with various issues of privatization in a number of countries and taught several courses on the subject. My continued interest in the subject is related to the fact that it can be analyzed from many different vantage points, given that privatization is by its very nature an interdisciplinary topic. It appears-as in so many other areas of economic policy-that political considerations rather than economics are the main driving force. Despite the countless publications that exist on the subject, many aspects of privatization have still been neglected or only recently received some attention. This book tries to fill part of the gap by introducing the reader to macroeconomic aspects of privatization and how these are related to the political economy of policymaking.

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Detail Information

Series Title

Why Do Governments Divest?

Call Number

-

Publisher

London : Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg., 2001

Collation

1-143

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

978-3-642-62573-2

Classification

NONE

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

1st Edtion

Subject(s)

Economics

Specific Detail Info

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Statement of Responsibility

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