Judith Clifton

Privatizing Public Enterprises in the European Union 1960-2002: Ideological, Pragmatic, Inevitable?

Abstract Privatization, recognized as one of the most important economic policy reforms from the 1970s, has attracted significant attention from scholars, and the literature on the topic is now vast. Yet there is little agreement on the reasons why governments privatized. Three dominant paradigms explaining European Union (EU) privatization put forward distinct motivations. The ‘British paradigm’ assumed that market-friendly ideology played a significant role in a path towards a global programme inspired by the UK experience. The ‘multiple logics’ approach observed that the UK was an anomaly, not a leader, and that EU privatization was so diverse that there were few, if any, common logics. The ‘European paradigm’ emphasized the importance of Europe in the context of a changing world and placed EU privatization in the context of economic and political integration. This article tests all three paradigms using comparative data on EU privatization by country and sector. Pragmatic concerns connected to European integration requirements, particularly in sectors such as telecommunications, transport and utilities, were of the utmost importance in motivating governments to privatize from the 1990s. Europe is thus a powerful explanatory factor when considering ongoing EU privatization.

EVALUATING EU POLICIES ON PUBLIC SERVICES: A CITIZENS' PERSPECTIVE

This article evaluates EU policies on public services – particularly public network services - from the citizens´ point of view. It is first argued that citizens´ perceptions about these services are important because they are essential for quality of life, but also because they exhibit economic characteristics such as asymmetrical information, adverse selection and positive externalities. Changing EU policy on public services is synthesised and classified into two main phases in section two. Citizen satisfaction with public services as revealed through surveys from 1997 to 2007 is explored in the third section. In the discussion, the prospects for EU policy on public services are considered and, it is argued that, from the perspectives of subsidiarity and proportionality, policy towards strengthening the common market is being increasingly uploaded to the supranational level in the form of directives, whilst cohesion and redistribution policies are being downloaded to the national level or dealt with at the supranational level by “soft” instruments.

‘Empowering Europe’s Citizens’? Towards a Charter for Services of General Interest

This article analyses the development of the European Union (EU) project of a Charter for Services of General Interest (SGI) from the mid-1990s to the publication of the White Paper on Services of General Interest and the draft European Constitution in 2004. Though service charters are often associated with New Public Management (NPM) reforms related to privatization, they are also an integral part of the process of EU institution building, and need to be understood alongside developments such as the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Using a four-stage model of international NPM convergence analysis four phases of the Charter for SGI experience are examined and compared to Anglo-Saxon experiences. Though there are important similarities linking the charter initiatives in the EU and the Anglo-Saxon world, there are also a number of important differences, which can be explained by the project to construct a supranational political citizenship, as well as vital institutional differences in capabilities related to EU competences and issues of governance.

The Political Economy of Telecoms and Electricity Internationalization in the Single Market

As a consequence of liberalization policies in the European Union (EU), a number of formerly inward-looking incumbents in telecommunications and electricity transformed themselves into some of the worlds leading multinationals. The relationship between liberalization and incumbent internationalization, however, is contested. Three political economy arguments on this relationship are tested. The first claims that incumbents most exposed to domestic liberalization would internationalize most. The second asserts that incumbents operating where liberalization was restricted could exploit monopolistic rents to finance internationalization. The third argument claims that a diversity of paths will be adopted by countries and incumbents vis-à-vis liberalization and internationalization. Using correlation and cluster analysis of EU telecoms and electricity incumbent multinationals, evidence is found in favour of the third hypothesis. Internationalization as a response to liberalization took diverse forms in terms of timing and extent and this is best explained using a country, sector and firm logic.

The impact of New Public Management on efficiency: An analysis of Madrid's hospitals

Madrid has recently become the site of one of the most controversial cases of public healthcare reform in the European Union. Despite the fact that the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) into Madrid hospitals has been vigorous, little scholarship has been done to test whether NPM actually led to technical efficiency. This paper is one of the first attempts to do so. We deploy a bootstrapped data envelopment analysis to compare efficiency scores in traditionally managed hospitals and those operating with new management formulas. We do not find evidence that NPM hospitals are more efficient than traditionally managed ones. Moreover, our results suggest that what actually matters may be the management itself, rather than the management model.

The race for international markets: Were privatized telecommunications incumbents more successful than their public counterparts?

Selling off formerly state-owned telecommunications incumbents played a major role in governments’ privatization programmes from the 1980s. One major consequence was that, from the late 1990s, a number of incumbents emerged as the world’s largest Multinational Corporations (MNCs). Despite the importance of this transformation, the determinants of telecommunications internationalization have not been fully analysed. We contribute to the emerging literature on this topic by testing the importance of ownership on the extent of telecommunications internationalization through an analysis of the uneven path to privatization and internationalization of the 22 major incumbents in the OECD. Our results demonstrate that privatization was not a significant factor when explaining internationalization patterns. Using cluster analysis, we show how telecommunications incumbents characterized by diverse ownership arrangements (public, private and mixed) were able to transform themselves into world-class operators.

Is Market-Oriented Reform Producing a “Two-Track” Europe? Evidence from Electricity and Telecommunications

The European Commission has formally recognised that adequate provision of basic household services, including energy, communications, water and transport, is key to ensuring equity, social cohesion and solidarity. Yet little research has been done on the impact of the reform of these services in this regard. This article offers an innovative way to explore such questions by analysing and contrasting stated and revealed preferences on citizen satisfaction with and expenditure on two services, electricity and telecommunications, in two large countries, Spain and the United Kingdom. In telecommunications, but to a much lesser extent in electricity, we find evidence that reform has led to a “two-track” Europe, where citizens who are elderly, not working or the less-educated behave differently in the market, with the result that they are less satisfied with these services than their younger, working, better-educated, counterparts.

The OECD and phases in the international political economy, 1961–2011

ABSTRACT In 2011, the OECD turned fifty. To provide a broad foundation for further thinking on this organization, we analyse its evolution over half a century from two perspectives: phases in the international political economy and the literature on IPE. By so doing, we uncover two paradoxes. Firstly, we find that the organizations evolution closely mirrored major phases in the post-war international political economy until recently. However, the OECDs long-term dependence on the West has now become an obstacle to its efforts to adapt to the latest phase, characterised by the rise of non-Western powers. Secondly, we show that, during the OECDs “golden age”, scholars paid relatively little attention to the organization but, from the 2000s, as the organization faced an unprecedented challenge of its potential economic decline, IPE literature on the organization blossomed.

The OECD and “The Rest”: Analyzing the Limits of Policy Transfer

Abstract Prompted by the rise of the emerging economies and the growing importance of the G20, the OECD has formally announced its intention of establishing itself as a key actor in global policy coordination. As part of this ambition, it has embarked on cultivating closer relations with five G20 countries it designated as key partners through the so-called “Enhanced Engagement” programme: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. This article mobilizes concepts from the policy transfer literature to explain why the OECD’s attempts to increasingly involve all five countries in its policy have fallen short of its original ambitions, and also why the transfer of its policy work has been uneven across policy and country issue.

The European Union, southern multinationals and the question of the 'strategic industries'

This paper analyzes how the European Union has responded to Inward Foreign Direct Investment from Emerging Markets, particularly in the so-called Strategic Industries. Attention is focused on two sectors which have long been considered strategic assets by most countries around the world for decades: energy and telecommunications. In order to understand the dynamics of the EUs international investment climate, particularly from the perspective of emerging markets, the paper contains three main levels of analysis. Firstly, the changing international context, in particular, the extent to which IFDI from emerging markets has challenged the status quo of the traditional investment climate, as well as the unfolding financial crisis and economic recession. Secondly, the European authorities, principally the European Commission (EC), as the main institution responsible for forging the European Single Market and ensuring the “four freedoms,” (goods, services, capital, and people). Thirdly, individual member state behavior, since it lies with national governments to establish FDI policy, and satisfy domestic political economy and welfare demands. It concludes that, when analysed comparatively, the EU is still one of the worlds most open regimes to IFDI and, though there is some evidence of protectionism vis-a-vis IFDI from emerging markets, there is also evidence of protectionism among member state economies themselves.