ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the connotation of the term ‘privatisation’ and contains a synoptic account of the UK experience in privatisation, on which the recent publication Privatisation in the UK provides a detailed survey. It presents inferences on what developing countries may learn from the UK experience. The chapter outlines some major issues that attempts at privatisation have raised in a number of developing economies and lists the important facets of the problem of privatisation. Privatisation covers a wide continuum of possibilities, between denationalisation at one end and market discipline at the other. The exact modality of privatisation is a function of the circumstances of the country and of the enterprise in question. The privatisation criteria, on the whole, tend to compromise between the exchequer perspective of giving up losses and holding on to profits, and national development strategy implying a preference for public investments in certain sectors.
