Privatize This?: Assessing the Opportunities and Costs of Privatization

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Bloomsbury Academic, Mar 3, 2011 - Business & Economics - 206 pages

This book offers an expert examination of the ideology and motives behind the privatization or the nationalization of an industry, based on real case studies.

Is it always more effective and less expensive to use taxpayer dollars to engage private companies rather than have the government run enterprises itself? Do consumers always benefit from the privatization of services? What happens when privatization stops being an abstract, theoretical debate and is actually put to the test in the real world? Privatize This? Assessing the Opportunities and Costs of Privatization is the place to find out.

Privatize This? provides a clear, easy-to-apply model for evaluating the pros and cons of the privatization process and then puts the model to work in examining nine real-world case studies—ranging from Spain's privatization of its cigarette industry to Pennsylvania's "state store system" for selling liquor. Throughout, the book focuses on the central issues of privatization—profit versus public good, protection from fraud and waste—while also showing how the recent economic upheaval has changed public opinion and public policy on privatization.

About the author (2011)

Richard A. McGowan is an Associate Professor at Boston College's Carroll School of Management and a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, where he has worked with Massachusetts state legislators formulating public policies affecting the sin industries. His previous books for the Greenwood Publishing Group include State Lotteries and Legalized Gambling: Painless Revenue or Painful Mirage (Quorum 1994) and (with John F. Mahon) Industry as a Player in the Political and Social Arena: Defining the Competitive Environment (Quorum 1996). He is also the author of Government and the Transformation of the Gaming Industry (2001).

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