ElasticSearch Score: 11.462569
August 14, 1997
Privatization—the transfer of activities from the public to the private sector—gained international prominence in the 1980s because of the need to reduce budget deficits and growing concerns about the efficiency of state-owned enterprises and government bureaucracies. This article examines privatization in Canada and its effect on governments' fiscal positions.
Privatization has generally been less rapid and extensive in Canada than elsewhere, partly because of the comparatively moderate size of our public sector. Nevertheless, federal, provincial, and municipal governments have increasingly reduced their direct involvement in the Canadian economy by selling Crown corporations, contracting with private firms to deliver public services, and transferring the development of public infrastructure projects to the private sector.
The fiscal impact of privatizing Crown corporations varies with such factors as the profitability of the enterprise, the size of the government's initial investment, and past write-downs. In general, when privatizations are part of a broader effort to improve public finances, they can contribute to fiscal consolidation by reducing budgetary requirements and debt levels.
When services and infrastructure projects are privatized, it is expected that more efficient private sector management will reduce government expenditures. For example, a private consortium may be better able to manage the financial risks involved in building an infrastructure facility, such as cost overruns or the withdrawal of contractors, than the public sector. The key to raising efficiency and lowering costs, however, is competition, not privatization per se. Therefore, the cost savings arising from the privatization of services or public works depend crucially on the terms of the contract.
Overall, when structured to improve economic efficiency, privatization is likely to enhance the economy's performance, thereby producing long-term economic and budgetary gains.
ElasticSearch Score: 11.425958
Should managers be paid in stock options if they provide stock-market participants with information about the firm? This paper studies how firm owners trade off the benefit of stock-price incentives and better-informed market participants against the cost of potential stock-price manipulation.
ElasticSearch Score: 11.36984
We study how different types of monetary policy shape the distributional effects of external economic shocks on households’ consumption in a small open economy. Our results present a trade-off between maintaining overall stabilization and controlling consumption inequality.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.983701
Consumption volatility relative to output volatility is consistently higher in emerging economies than in developed economies.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.534758
The present paper shows that, everything else equal, some transactions to transfer portfolio credit risk to third-party investors increase the insolvency risk of banks. This is particularly likely if a bank sells the senior tranche and retains a sufficiently large first-loss position.
ElasticSearch Score: 10.437877
This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.582318
In theory, nominal exchange rate movements can lead to “expenditure switching” when they generate changes in the relative prices of goods across countries. This paper explores whether the expenditure-switching role of exchange rates has changed in the current episode of significant global imbalances.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.560371
The author investigates the quantitative importance of the expenditure-switching effect by developing and estimating a structural sticky-price model nesting both producer currency pricing (PCP) and local currency pricing (LCP) settings.
ElasticSearch Score: 9.118187
Most models in finance assume that agents make trading plans over the infinite future. We consider instead that they are boundedly rational and may only form forecasts over a limited horizon.
ElasticSearch Score: 8.98018
ToTEM III is the most recent generation of the Bank of Canada’s main dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for projection and policy analysis. The model helps Bank staff tell clear and coherent stories about the Canadian economy’s current state and future evolution.