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The missing shock: the macroeconomic impact of British privatisation

Author

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  • 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
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    Cited by:

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.
    4. Andrea Bastianin & Paolo Castelnovo & Massimo Florio, "undated". "The Empirics of Regulatory Reforms Proxied by Categorical Variables: Recent Findings and Methodological Issues," ETA: Economic Theory and Applications 257877, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM).
    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. 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.

    More about this item

    Keywords

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    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

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