Liberalization-privatization paths: policies and politics

We empirically investigate the political determinants of deregulation policies in six network industries of thirty OECD countries, over 1975-2007. Contrary to previous literature, we unbundle privatization and liberalization policies and measure whether their simultaneous determination is affected by government’s ideology. Despite conventional wisdom, we find a systematic political trade-off between privatizations and liberalizations. Right-wing executives tend to privatize more and to liberalize less, relative to left-wing governments. The main lesson we derive is that ideological cleavages affect the composition of deregulation policy. Our results may shed new lights on the political-economic rationale behind deregulation choices.