1,720,992 research outputs found
Privatization and Efficiency: from principals and agents to political economy
No full textWe survey the theoretical literature on privatization and efficiency by tracing its evolution from the applications of agency theory to recent contributions in the field of political economy. The former extend the theory of regulation with incomplete information to address privatization issues, comparing state-owned enterprises with private regulated firms. The benefits of privatization may derive either from the constraints it places on malevolent agents or from the impossibility of commitment by a benevolent government because of incomplete contracts. Contributions dealing with political economy issues separate privatization from restructuring decisions. They either explore bargaining between managers and politicians or analyse the impact of privatization shaped by political preferences on efficiency. The theoretical results regarding the relation between privatization and efficiency do not lead to any definitive conclusion. Privatization may increase productive efficiency when restructuring takes place whereas its effects on allocative efficiency still remain uncertain
The Distributional Impact of Privatization in Developing Countries: the Role of Democratic Institutions
No full textFocusing on developing countries which have recently experienced political and economic transitions, we study how income inequality is related to privatization in the light of the democratization process. We find that a marginal increase in privatization revenue is positively and significantly correlated with a rise in the level of inequality in the income distribution only when the protection of the civil liberties and the guarantee of the political rights are not widely ensured to all citizens.
Then, our evidence suggests an interesting policy implication concerning the timing of democratization and privatization in developing countries: only when the democratization process is well developed, privatization can be implemented safely from an equity point of view
Preferences for Redistribution: Two Decades of Gender Gaps and Generational Differences in Europe
Full text linkWe provide a concise overview of the literature concerning the factors influencing preferences for redistribution, with particular attention to works that have integrated considerations of gender and/or cohort heterogeneity into their analyses. We then present a series of stylized facts on preferences for redistribution based on data from the European Social Survey for a wide array of European countries
over the period spanning from 2002 to 2022. We document that, since 2002, the average preferences
for redistribution have increased. While the gender gap has remained substantially unchanged, the
generational gap has widened over time. Distinguishing women and men by a set of individual characteristics, instead, there exists a not negligible heterogeneity both ‘between’ and ‘within’ women and men. At the country level, the overall gender gap in preferences for redistribution increases as the
country’s per capita income or gender equality increase. Conversely, the gender gap decreases in
more income, unequal, and religious countries. Finally, looking at the two exogenous shocks, that is,
the 2008 financial and economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic, we observe that average individual
attitudes towards redistribution react to both events but in a surprisingly opposite way, with a relevant
heterogeneity across different sub-groups of women and men
The political economy of taxation: lessons from developing countries
No full textTaxation is a major issue in economics and politics. We focus on a sample of countries which have experienced an economic and a democratic transition in Asia and Latin America for the period 1990-2004. Using a new large dataset we find that tax revenue is higher in more democratic regimes, consistently with the standard view that democracies have to satisfy the redistributive needs of the electorate. A final relationship between the level of democracy and the composition of taxes (mainly direct versus indirect) is instead much less clear to predict. A comparison with New EU members countries suggests that more mature democracies are associated with a higher level of direct taxes
Inequality, Privatization and Democratic Institutions in Developing Countries
No full textAccording to the existing theoretical literature there are several channels through
which privatization of State-owned enterprises and assets may shape the distribution
of income either increasing or decreasing the level of inequality. As a consequence,
assessing the actual distributional impact of privatization becomes an empirical mat-
ter. This paper is a rst attempt to empirically investigate the relationship between
privatization and income inequality focusing on the role of democratic institutions
in developing countries. Using an unbalanced panel of 80 countries in the period
1988-2008, we nd that privatization is negatively and signicantly correlated with
inequality when democratic institutions are well consolidated, and positively when
they are not. Our results, robust to dierent specications, measures of democ-
racy and economic controls, suggest an interesting and not yet investigated policy
implication for low or middle-income countries: only after having established ma-
ture representative political institutions, privatization appears to be related to a
reduction in income inequality
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