ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: UK PRIVATIZATION-A BLUEPRINT FOR OTHER COUNTRIES? The policy of privatization now sweeping through the world commenced in Britain in the early 1980s. Although it began as a limited programme of returning some major utilities to private ownership, it quickly gathered pace and became an apparently unstoppable movement to restore the market system and ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’. The political consensus in Britain that there is an appropriate balance of public and private industries, upheld by all post-war governments, was deliberately shattered. The impression was created that the public sector was inherently inefficient and wasteful, and that the release of entrepreneurial energies with the escape to privatization would quickly transform any sluggish public sector enterprise into a competitive, dynamic concern.
