The Comparative Performance of Public and Private Ownership

Abstract

At first blush it is remarkable how little work has been done by economists on a subject so popular and contentious in the political arena. At second blush there is perhaps little surprise given the huge pitfalls of a conceptual and measurement variety and the difficulty, at least in this country, of finding the two species in coexistence in the same product area. The recent surge of cost studies has, belatedly, drawn on the wide variety of institutional forms in certain industries in North America. Even so the coverage is patchy. Electricity has been well studied and there has been some work on water supply, railways, urban transport and airlines. In these areas output is generally subject to user charges. This paper therefore focuses on areas of a semi-commercial’ nature so that health and education are not covered though the temptation could not not be resisted of including an area both fecund in its variety of institutional forms and one where economists seem to have found their true home, refuse collection. There is a problem in specifying what is meant by performance and how it is measured. There is, on the other side of the coin, a problem in knowing what can be deduced from those things that can sometimes be measured, that is relative costs and relative profitability. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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