IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mil/wpdepa/2003-21.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The missing shock: the macroeconomic impact of British privatisation

Author

Listed:
  • Massimo Florio
  • Mara Grasseni

Abstract

The privatisation policy pursued in the UK by Mrs Thatcher's government (1979-1990) and subsequently by Mr Major's government (1990-1997) was the largest experiment in public divestitures among capitalist economies. It had a deep impact on economic policy-making worlwide, and was vastly imitated, in Western Europe, in the former planned economies, in a number of less developed countries. In this paper we test the impact of privatisation on macroeconomic performance in the United Kingdom using quarterly data from 1979 to 1999. In the econometric model, we use privatisation proceeds as an explanatory variable and we control for several other variables. Testing for cointegration the results show that there is a long run equilibrium relationship between GDP growth and the variables used in the model. However, in our empirical analysis we find a weak evidence that privatisation generated an aggregate shock on output in the UK. This result is consistent with empirical literature on microecononmic evidence that shows that in the UK ownership change per se had little impact on long term productivity trends.

Suggested Citation

  • Massimo Florio & Mara Grasseni, 2003. "The missing shock: the macroeconomic impact of British privatisation," Departmental Working Papers 2003-21, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    • Handle: RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2003-21
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://wp.demm.unimi.it/files/wp/2003/DEMM-2003_021wp.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mr. George A Mackenzie, 1997. "The Macroeconomic Impact of Privatization," IMF Policy Discussion Papers 1997/009, International Monetary Fund.
    2. Mr. Steven A Barnett, 2000. "Evidenceon the Fiscal and Macroeconomic Impact of Privatization," IMF Working Papers 2000/130, International Monetary Fund.
    3. Johansen, Soren & Juselius, Katarina, 1990. "Maximum Likelihood Estimation and Inference on Cointegration--With Applications to the Demand for Money," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 52(2), pages 169-210, May.
    4. Emanuele Bacchiocchi & Massimo Florio & Mara Grasseni, 2005. "The missing shock: the macroeconomic impact of British Privatizations," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(14), pages 1585-1596.
    5. Johansen, Soren & Juselius, Katarina, 1994. "Identification of the long-run and the short-run structure an application to the ISLM model," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 63(1), pages 7-36, July.
    6. Willem H. Buiter, 1990. "Principles of Budgetary and Financial Policy," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262524139, December.
    7. Jeffry M. Netter & William L. Megginson, 2001. "From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 39(2), pages 321-389, June.
    8. Nicholas Oulton, 1995. "Supply Side Reform and UK Economic Growth: What Happened To The Miracle?," National Institute Economic Review, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, vol. 154(1), pages 53-70, November.
    9. G. A. Mackenzie, 1998. "The Macroeconomic Impact of Privatization," IMF Staff Papers, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 45(2), pages 363-373, June.
    10. Johansen, Soren, 1991. "Estimation and Hypothesis Testing of Cointegration Vectors in Gaussian Vector Autoregressive Models," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 59(6), pages 1551-1580, November.
    11. Davidson, James E H, et al, 1978. "Econometric Modelling of the Aggregate Time-Series Relationship between Consumers' Expenditure and Income in the United Kingdom," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 88(352), pages 661-692, December.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bastianin, Andrea & Castelnovo, Paolo & Florio, Massimo, 2018. "Evaluating regulatory reform of network industries: a survey of empirical models based on categorical proxies," Utilities Policy, Elsevier, vol. 55(C), pages 115-128.
    2. Emanuele Bacchiocchi & Massimo Florio & Mara Grasseni, 2005. "The missing shock: the macroeconomic impact of British Privatizations," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 37(14), pages 1585-1596.
    3. Orietta DESSY & Massimo FLORIO, 2004. "Workers' earnings in the UK before and after privatisation: a study of five industries," Departmental Working Papers 2004-13, Department of Economics, Management and Quantitative Methods at Università degli Studi di Milano.
    4. Schuster, Philipp & Schmitt, Carina & Traub, Stefan, 2013. "The retreat of the state from entrepreneurial activities: A convergence analysis for OECD countries, 1980–2007," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 95-112.
    5. Giuseppe Cinquegrana & Serena Migliardo & Domenico Sarno, 2016. "Comparative analysis of private and public provision of the water and waste services by the Italian municipalities," ECONOMIA PUBBLICA, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 2016(3), pages 149-176.
    6. Andrea Bastianin & Paolo Castelnovo & Massimo Florio, 2017. "The Empirics of Regulatory Reforms Proxied by Categorical Variables: Recent Findings and Methodological Issues," Working Papers 2017.22, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    7. Emanuele Bacchiocchi & Toru Kitagawa, 2020. "Locally- but not globally-identified SVARs," CeMMAP working papers CWP40/20, Centre for Microdata Methods and Practice, Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Koi Nyen Wong & Tuck Cheong Tang, 2009. "Exchange rate variability and the export demand for Malaysia's semiconductors: an empirical study," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 43(6), pages 695-706.
    2. Sogiakas, Vasilios & Karathanassis, George, 2015. "Informational efficiency and spurious spillover effects between spot and derivatives markets," Global Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 27(C), pages 46-72.
    3. H. Peter Boswijk & Jurgen A. Doornik, 2004. "Identifying, estimating and testing restricted cointegrated systems: An overview," Statistica Neerlandica, Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research, vol. 58(4), pages 440-465, November.
    4. Barot, Bharat & Yang, Zan, 2002. "House Prices and Housing Investment in Sweden and the United Kingdom: Econometric Analysis for the Period 1970-1998," Working Papers 80, National Institute of Economic Research.
    5. Kremers, Jeroen J M & Ericsson, Neil R & Dolado, Juan J, 1992. "The Power of Cointegration Tests," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 54(3), pages 325-348, August.
    6. Neil R. Ericsson & James G. MacKinnon, 2002. "Distributions of error correction tests for cointegration," Econometrics Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 5(2), pages 285-318, June.
    7. Scheiblecker, Marcus, 2013. "Between cointegration and multicointegration: Modelling time series dynamics by cumulative error correction models," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 31(C), pages 511-517.
    8. Urbain, Jean-Pierre, 1995. "Partial versus full system modelling of cointegrated systems an empirical illustration," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 177-210, September.
    9. Campos, Julia & Ericsson, Neil R. & Hendry, David F., 1996. "Cointegration tests in the presence of structural breaks," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 187-220, January.
    10. Asche, Frank & Gjolberg, Ole & Volker, Teresa, 2003. "Price relationships in the petroleum market: an analysis of crude oil and refined product prices," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 289-301, May.
    11. Kalyoncu, Huseyin, 2006. "An aggregate import demand function for Turkey: a cointegration analysis," MPRA Paper 4260, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    12. Shadman-Mehta, Fatemeh & Sneessens, Henri R., 1998. "Demand-Supply Interactions and Unemployment Dynamics: Can there be Path Dependency ? The Case of Belgium, 1955-1994," LIDAM Discussion Papers IRES 1998017, Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES).
    13. Schuster, Philipp & Schmitt, Carina & Traub, Stefan, 2013. "The retreat of the state from entrepreneurial activities: A convergence analysis for OECD countries, 1980–2007," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 95-112.
    14. Diamandis, Panayiotis F. & Georgoutsos, Dimitris A. & Kouretas, Georgios P., 2000. "The monetary model in the presence of I(2) components: long-run relationships, short-run dynamics and forecasting of the Greek drachma," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 19(6), pages 917-941, December.
    15. Georgoutsos, Dimitris A. & Kouretas, Georgios P., 2016. "Interest parity, cointegration, and the term structure: Testing in an integrated framework," International Review of Financial Analysis, Elsevier, vol. 46(C), pages 281-294.
    16. Ismail Genc & Abdullah Jubain & Abdullah Al-Mutairi, 2010. "Economic versus financial integration or decoupling between the US and the GCC," Applied Financial Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 20(20), pages 1577-1583.
    17. Panayiotis Diamantis & Dimitris Georgoutsos & George Kouretas, 2001. "The Monetary Approach in the Presence of I(2) Components: A Cointegration Analysis of the Official and Black Market for Foreign Currency in Latin America," Working Papers 0108, University of Crete, Department of Economics.
    18. repec:zbw:bofrdp:1992_022 is not listed on IDEAS
    19. Vitale, Jeffrey D. & Bessler, David A., 2006. "The 2004 Niger Food Crisis: What Role Can Price Discovery Play in Famine Early Warning Systems?," 2006 Annual meeting, July 23-26, Long Beach, CA 21316, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    20. Shingal, ANIRUDH, 2010. "Services growth and convergence: Getting India’s states together," MPRA Paper 32813, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    21. Tourinho, Octávio A. F ., 1997. "The Demand and Supply of Money Under High Inflation: Brazil 1974-1994," Brazilian Review of Econometrics, Sociedade Brasileira de Econometria - SBE, vol. 17(2), November.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Privatisation; United Kingdom; GDP growth;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H32 - Public Economics - - Fiscal Policies and Behavior of Economic Agents - - - Firm
    • H82 - Public Economics - - Miscellaneous Issues - - - Governmental Property
    • L16 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Industrial Organization and Macroeconomics; Macroeconomic Industrial Structure
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mil:wpdepa:2003-21. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: DEMM Working Papers (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/damilit.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.