ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION Privatisation is now a major part of industrial policy in many developed and developing countries. One of the main objectives of privatisation is to improve efficiency, defined usually in terms of achieving higher productivity, lower-cost production and higher profitability. This book has been concerned with exploring the nature of the privatisation argument, considering public choice and property rights theories, the nature of efficiency and empirical studies of public versus private ownership. In particular, the performance of eleven organisations that were privatised in the UK in the 1980s has been studied using a range of performance indicators.
