ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to argue in favour of making public enterprises accountable for their performance, defined as the way they fulfil the missions assigned to them by the public authority. This requires a rigorous and regular performance assessment. Had such an approach been adopted earlier, unneeded and costly privatizations would have been avoided, as would the constraints of inefficient public-private partnership arrangements. Recent research on enterprise performance seems to suggest that institutions matter more than ownership.
