I'd first consider examples where privatization has and has not worked. In 1980s UK, it seemed to work well (British Petroleum, British Telecom, British Gas, National Grid, etc). Although railway privatization has had mixed results.

Success/failure is not only driven by public/private ownership percentage but also the extent to which the public sector intervenes in board governance, management and industrial relations.

Lilian Mboya , thank you for usefull matherial. It was very interesting.

Christopher C Kelly Thank you! I agree with you that it`s important the quolity of management and flexibility of making decigion

I suppose, "it depends" would be my response. It depends on the type of business, whether everyone needs it, or just some people who choose to use it, and whether the enterprise is competitive, or a natural monopoly. I don't think there's just one answer. Competitive businesses are best left to self-regulate, in large measure. Where competition cannot exist, then strict regulation becomes essential.

To me, the more intriguing question would be, why would anyone believe that a relatively small number of government bureaucrats is better capable of running business, than individuals in the general population, who have "their own skin in the game," so to speak.

If people are given the opportunity and incentive of doing what's best, in the aggregate, it's only logical to think that they can outwit any subgroup of government bureaucrats, easily. The advantage government has is that it taxes the public, so it has considerable monetary resources to throw at problems. But I don't think we can assume this is always a good thing.

Dear Olena Pozniakova,

As an example for the analysis, I propose a comparative analysis of the ownership transformation processes with the process that took place in the country where I operate. The processes of systemic and economic transformation began in the country where I have been operating since 1989. In the first half of the 1990s, key systemic changes were made to enable the development of private property, privatization processes and a departure from a centrally planned economy. since the beginning of the 1990s, many enterprises that previously operated as state-owned enterprises have been privatized. The privatization process covered large and smaller companies, both large enterprises operating in various sectors and sectors of the economy and companies from the SME sector, which were relatively small at that time. The privatization process often involved the transformation of a state-owned enterprise into a one-person state-owned company in order to commercialize the functioning of the economic entity. It was the first stage that forced the economic entity to adapt to the new, more market-based economic realities. Then, using various formulas for the sale of state treasury assets, privatization was carried out by selling directly to a private other economic entity, often foreign, or through a public offering by offering shares to various groups of investors. If individual investors were also included among these other groups of investors, then the capital company became a public company and its shares were traded on the stock exchange on the national stock exchange. In the 1990s, the banking system was also transformed. Thanks to analogous privatization processes, many domestic banking entities were taken over by foreign financial institutions. At the end of the 1990s, this degree of takeover of the commercial banking sector was over 90%. Currently, the prevailing opinion is that the banking sector should be classified as strategic for the state, similarly to the energy sector, public sectors and those ensuring certain categories of public safety and the state, and therefore the degree of takeover of entities in a given sector should not be the majority. As a result, the aforementioned degree of takeover has now dropped to around 47%. However, many other mistakes and errors were made during the privatization processes of the 1990s. As a result of the mistakes made, many large state-owned companies that were well-known not only nationally but also internationally recognizable and competitive brands of various products ceased to exist, because these companies were allowed to go bankrupt, explaining that they were unable to adapt to new, more market-based economic conditions. And it was enough to create systemic, interventionist instruments of support for these companies in order to enable them to effectively carry out commercialization and more social and national privatization and to adapt to new, more and more market and competitive economic conditions. The systemic support program covered mainly the transformed banking system, while many non-financial sectors did not receive virtually any support from the state in the 1990s. Currently, the country functions economically in the model of social market economy with a large scope of state intervention. This large scope of state intervention can be seen on the example of the anti-crisis instruments of socio-economic policy, including fiscal, budgetary and sectoral instruments built on the formula of national Keynsism and the extended formula of the monetary policy of the central bank implemented in a coordinated manner with government-coordinated social and economic development programs. Specific interventionist instruments of individual, subsequent so-called Anti-Crisis Shields and Industry Shields (currently in January 2021 Anti-Crisis Shield / Industry Shield No. / ver 6) are designed to limit the economic recession caused by the SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) coronavirus pandemic. The strategic goals of the aforementioned Anti-Crisis and Industry Shields are primarily to reduce the scale of unemployment growth, decrease in consumption, decrease in production and investment, decrease in the income of citizens and enterprises, and thus, in macroeconomic terms, limit the scale of the decline in economic growth and the scale of economic recession. As part of these Anti-Crisis and Industry Shields, they are offered to commercially operating business entities, e.g. subsidies to employee wages, refinancing of part of fixed costs, temporary exemption from paying contributions to the social security system, tax breaks, etc. These interventionist programs are partially financed directly from the state budget and mainly from the issue of successive series of treasury bonds, which are purchased by various categories of investors, including domestic and foreign institutional investors and domestic individual investors. However, the scale of financial resources that are released to cover these large needs of interventionist support for maintaining business continuity of commercially operating enterprises is so large that recently one of the main types of investors purchasing Treasury bonds is the national central bank, which thus introduces additional money into the economy of the national currency . Each systemic solution has its specific weaker or negative sides. For the solution that is currently used, these negative aspects include an increase in inflation, an increase in public debt in the public finance system of the state, an increase in the budget deficit, the risk of activating mainly current consumption instead of activating investments, weakening of the domestic currency against other currencies, etc. More on this I wrote this topic on various threads of the discussion forum on my Research Gate profile. I conduct research on this issue and invite you to scientific cooperation, e.g. in the field of joint publication of scientific papers on a comparative analysis of the applied systemic, anti-crisis, interventionist solutions, etc. of socio-economic policy, applied in individual countries.

Regards, Stay healthy!

Happy New Year 2021

Dariusz Prokopowicz

I own a very rural property. The cost for me to plow snow from the road in front of my property is significantly more than what I pay in taxes. There is an economy of scale that keeps the cost of providing collective services below the cost of providing individual services.

I would argue that the cost of providing services (public vs private) should be monitored, and public ownership should be maintained at or near the optimal balance.

Efficiency isn't the whole picture. Generally, increasing efficiency decreases resilience, so it depends what is important to you - do you want to maximize today's performance, or the long-term performance? Having a robust civil service isn't a bad idea if they are given the opportunity to apply adaptive management (which doesn't happen much, I admit).

Good question and interested discussions