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J Manag Gov (2014) 18:2949
DOI 10.1007/s10997-012-9235-4
Fabio Monteduro
Published online: 5 October 2012 Springer Science+Business Media New York 2012
Abstract In the last century local public services have often been reformed. The declared outcome of the most recent reforms is the privatization and liberalization of the sector. However, in almost all European countries, the privatization of local public services has been only partial, because local governments have sought to privatise a minority stake in the public owned-companies, while remaining committed to retaining public ownership and control over the longer-term as a means of protecting public interest. The phenomenon of mixed publicprivate companies emerged as a result of this process. In this context, the article investigates whether differences in nancial performance can be found between publicprivate companies and totally public-owned enterprises. Empirical quantitative studies on this particular topic are quite lacking at the moment. The present study tries to ll this gap through an empirical analysis on a sample of 623 Italian local utilities. The results of the study suggest that there are differences in economic performance between local utility companies with varying degrees of public ownership. In particular, publicprivate utilities show better economic performance than publicly owned rms, especially in terms of protability. The results also seem to suggest that the majority private ownership is not necessary for better performance. In other terms, publicprivate partnershipand not private majority ownershipseems to be the key point for good performance.
Keywords Public utilities Performance Publicprivate partnerships
Ownership Privatization
1 Introduction
During the last century, the eld of local public services has experienced profound changes worldwide (Osborne and Brown 2005). The years following World War II
F. Monteduro (&)
University of Rome Tor VergataCISPA, via Bernardino Alimena 5, 00173 Rome, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
Publicprivate versus public ownership and economic performance: evidence from Italian local utilities
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showed a clear tendency of governments to intervene in the economy through public ownership and regulation. On the contrary, by the 1970s, the poor performance of public-owned companies began to be evident and strong debates emerged on how to improve their performance. By the middle of the 1980s, privatisation had become a key component of economic reform within the OECD area (OECD 2003).
For many years the debate on...