IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-349-07419-8_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

The Comparative Performance of Public and Private Ownership

Author

Listed:
  • Robert Millward

    (University of Salford)

Abstract

At first blush it is remarkable how little work has been done by economists on a subject so popular and contentious in the political arena. At second blush there is perhaps little surprise given the huge pitfalls of a conceptual and measurement variety and the difficulty, at least in this country, of finding the two species in coexistence in the same product area. The recent surge of cost studies has, belatedly, drawn on the wide variety of institutional forms in certain industries in North America. Even so the coverage is patchy. Electricity has been well studied and there has been some work on water supply, railways, urban transport and airlines. In these areas output is generally subject to user charges. This paper therefore focuses on areas of a semi-commercial’ nature so that health and education are not covered though the temptation could not not be resisted of including an area both fecund in its variety of institutional forms and one where economists seem to have found their true home, refuse collection. There is a problem in specifying what is meant by performance and how it is measured. There is, on the other side of the coin, a problem in knowing what can be deduced from those things that can sometimes be measured, that is relative costs and relative profitability.

Suggested Citation

  • Robert Millward, 1982. "The Comparative Performance of Public and Private Ownership," Palgrave Macmillan Books,, Palgrave Macmillan.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-07419-8_4
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-07419-8_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:pal:palchp:978-1-349-07419-8_4. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    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.