Privatization in Chile : an economic appraisal /

Privatization--the turning over to the private sector of government-owned and run enterprises--has become part of the strategy for restructuring the respective roles of market and state in many less-developed nations, as well as former socialist countries, facing economic crisis. For many orthodox economists, privatization is viewed as an a priori good; for many liberal economists, there has been a deep distrust of the motives animating the drive toward privatization. In Latin America, Chile and Mexico have had the most far-reaching strategies to privatize their parastatals. This is a brilliant and especially thorough study of virtually all the dimensions of Chile's privatization--from details of sell-off methods, the impact on government revenues and wealth, employment effects, interclass wealth transfers, and so on. The authors (both at the Pontifical Catholic Univ., Chile) are strong supporters, but not simple apologists, of privatization, and their analysis is fairhanded and enlightening, even for those who believe privatization to have been carried too far. This is the most complete and most analytic study of Chile's program and of privatization to date. Graduate; faculty. J. L. Dietz; California State University, Fullerton