ElasticSearch Score: 13.824618
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: 13.442487
The author studies the welfare implications of adjustment programs supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He uses a model where an endogenous borrowing constraint, set up by international lenders who will never lend more than a debt ceiling, forces the borrowing economy to always choose repayment over default.
ElasticSearch Score: 12.961314
We build an otherwise-standard business cycle model with housework, calibrated consistently with data on time use, in order to discipline consumption-hours complementarity and relate its strength to the size of fiscal multipliers.
ElasticSearch Score: 12.792004
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: 12.751266
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: 12.677826
We measure systemic risk in the network of financial market infrastructures (FMIs) as the probability that two or more FMIs have a large credit risk exposure to the same FMI participant.
ElasticSearch Score: 12.590163
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: 12.492578
Consumption volatility relative to output volatility is consistently higher in emerging economies than in developed economies.
ElasticSearch Score: 11.635397
The paper examines how the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis is affected by a modern variation of the standard model that allows product differentiation (within the traded and nontraded goods sectors) with the number of firms determined exogenously or endogenously.
ElasticSearch Score: 11.212593
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.