THE UK’S PRIVATISATION EXPERIMENT: THE P ASSAGE OF TIME PERMITS A SOBER ASSESSMENT DAVID PARKER CESIFO WORKING PAPER NO. 1126 CATEGORY 9: INDUSTRIAL ORGANISATION FEBRUARY 2004 PRESENTED AT CESIFO CONFERENCE ON PRIVATISATION EXPERIENCES IN THE EU NOVEMBER 2003 An electronic version of the paper may be downloaded • from the SSRN website: www.SSRN.com • from the CESifo website: www.CESifo.de CESifo Working Paper No. 1126 THE UK’S PRIVATISATION EXPERIMENT: THE PASSAGE OF TIME PERMITS A SOBER ASSESSMENT Abstract This chapter looks at the UK’s privatisation experiment, which began from the late 1970s. It considers the background to the UK’s privatisations, which industries were privatised and how, and summarises the results of studies of performance changes in privatised companies in the UK. It looks at the relative roles of competition, regulation and ownership changes in determining performance improvement. It concludes by looking at the wider lessons that might be learned from the UK’s privatisation experiment, including the importance of developing competitive markets and, in their absence, effective regulatory regimes. Keywords: UK, privatisation, competition regulation, lessons. JEL Classification: L33, H82, L51. David Parker Cranfield University School of Management Cranfield Bedfordshire MK43 0AL United Kingdom
[email protected] Introduction The Labour Government of 1974-79 arranged the sale of some of the state’s shareholding in the petroleum company BP. However, this sale was dictated by budgetary pressures and did not reflect a belief within government that state industries should be privatised. Indeed, the same Labour Government took into state ownership two major industries, namely aerospace and shipbuilding.