PUBLIC ENTERPRISE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION: prospects and constraints

ABSTRACT * : The author highlights the problems and prospects of public enterprises within the European Union, as well as the major adjustments considered necessary for these enterprises to fulfil their role. He argues that general criteria determining whether the production of goods and services should be in the public sector cannot be readily established in the European Union, since public supply does not solely depend on the specific economic characteristics of the particular good or service, but also on the prevailing social, cultural and economic conditions in each country, on the economic policy pursued, and on the structural characteristics of its private and public sectors, including entrepreneurial and trade union behaviour.     

PUBLIC POLICY SUPPORT FOR AGRICULTURAL COOPERATIVES: AN ORGANIZATIONAL ECONOMICS APPROACH

This paper addresses the issue of whether nontraditional agricultural cooperatives should be eligible for receiving public policy support. We adopt an organizational economics approach that appears to better inform policy design and suggest critical questions that both policy makers and regulators need to address before introducing measures and sanctions. After discussing the introduction of innovative cooperative models characterized by a whole new set of ownership and control rights, we recast vaguely defined property rights problems as attempts to maximize efficiency and avoid organizational decline rather than to take advantage of excessive market power in highly concentrated oligopsonistic/oligopolistic markets.     

PUBLIC ENTERPRISE IN THE MODERN WESTERN WORLD: AN HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT: The aim of this article is to explain the pattern of public enterprise in Western Europe, Japan and the USA in the late 20th century, just before the onset of privatization. This requires an examination of the origins which date from the early 19th century. A common misconception is that public enterprise was a device for overcoming problems of natural monopoly and/or a socialist instrument for mitigating worker exploitation. It is argued that the former was mainly dealt with by arms’ length regulation and that socialist forces were limited. Public enterprise was common in grid networks everywhere and, in manufacturing, more common in Germany, Spain, Italy than elsewhere. Why also were the USA and UK (up to 1939) different and what does the privatization experience tell us about public enterprise? The answer is that public enterprise was often an instrument for promoting social and political unification, securing national defence and related strategic considerations, increasingly in the 20th century for promoting economic growth, with regulatory failures and socialist pressures playing a more subsidiary and/or occasional role.