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Privatization in the United States

Florencio Lopez-de-Silane, +2 more
- 23 Jan 1997 - 
- Vol. 28, Iss: 3, pp 447-471
TLDR
In the United States, the two principal modes of producing local government services are in-house provision by government employees and contracting out to private suppliers, also known as privatization.
Abstract
In the United States, the two principal modes of producing local government services are in-house provision by government employees and contracting out to private suppliers, also known as privatization. We examine empirically how U.S. counties choose the mode of providing services. The evidence indicates that state clean-government laws and state laws restricting county spending encourage privatization, whereas strong public unions discourage it. This points to the important roles played by political patronage and taxpayer resistance to government spending in the privatization decision.

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References
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Book

The Theory of Economic Regulation

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit, and that the state has one basic resource which in pure principle is not shared with even the mightiest of its citizens.
Journal ArticleDOI

Politicians and Firms

TL;DR: This article present a model of bargaining between politicians and managers that explains many stylized facts about the behavior of state firms, their commercialization, and privatization, including subsidies to public enterprises and bribes from managers to politicians.
Book

The Privatization Decision: Public Ends, Private Means

TL;DR: The Architecture of Accountability, Privatization and Public Spending Evidence And Arguments as discussed by the authors, Organizational Form and Function, The Evidence On Efficiency, The Terms of the Privatisation Decision Cases And Cautionary Tales, Lessons from the Pentagon, Local Service Contracting, Private Prisons Debate, Business, Government, and Job Training
Book ChapterDOI

Economic Rationales for the Scope of Privatization

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors identify, at a fundamental theoretical level, the impacts of privatization on the operations of an enterprise and present the delineation of various characteristics of an activity's structure and environment that point to either public or private forms of control as the most effective in accomplishing society's aims.
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