ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the history of road freight privatisation and discusses the relationship between deregulation and privatisation in the UK. It aims to compare the privatisation programmes and the road freight industry under the three different systems of the UK, Hungary and Egypt. The road freight industry in all three countries is highly fragmented, dominated by large numbers of small firms, with a small number of large firms. Hungary is a landlocked state located in East-Central Europe at the cross roads of major trade routes both from north to south between the Baltic and the Mediterranean Seas, and east to west between Russia and the European Union. The employee buy-out of the National Freight Corporation is unique in the history of road freight privatisation in Britain. The mid-1960s saw a further turning point for the Hungarian economy with the re-emergence of economic tensions, such as increasing disequilibrium in the balance of trade and payments.
