Asset-stripping the state

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 55, 2009, Pages 109-132

  De Medeiros, Carlos Aguiar ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 59649090452     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. Economist, 21 August 1993. Throughout this essay, privatization is understood as the transfer of both ownership and control of a state asset to the private sector, rather than simply a sale of state assets.
2. Bernardo Bortolotti and Domenico Siniscalco, The Challenges of Privatization, Oxford 2004, p. 97.
3. The term 'distributional coalition' is drawn from Mancur Olson, who defined it as a group 'oriented to struggles over the distribution of income and wealth rather than to the production of additional output': see Rise and Decline of Nations, New Haven 1982, p. 44.
4. Robert Millward, Private and Public Enterprise in Europe, Cambridge 2005, p. 295.
5. R. P. Short, 'The Role of Public Enterprises: An International Statistical Comparison', in Robert Floyd, Clive Gray and R. P. Short, Public Enterprise in Mixed Economies, Washington, DC 1984.
6. Short, 'The Role of Public Enterprises'. Much less ideological than the studies published by the World Bank and IMF in the 1990s, this report accepts that the existence of a deficit is not necessarily a problem in itself.
7. Data from World Bank, Bureaucrats in Business: The Economics and Politics of Government Ownership, Washington, DC 1995.
8. Andrew Glyn, Capitalism Unleashed: Finance, Globalization and Welfare, Oxford 2006, p. 39.
9. Bob Rowthorn and Ha-Joon Chang, 'Public Ownership and the Theory of the State', in Thomas Clarke and Christos Pitelis, eds, The Political Economy of Privatization, New York 1993, p. 61.
10. Bortolotti and Siniscalco, Challenges of Privatization, p. 97.
11. For example, they were used by the UK when the Kuwait Investment Office began building up a stake in BP, and recently by the US against China, Italy and France to stave off bids for public utilities.
12. Roberto Zagha and Gobind Nankani, Economic Growth in the 1990s, Washington, DC 2005, p. 167.
13. There is, however, a basic contradiction in this kind of privatization: investors themselves - in the main, financial groups - will not seek to acquire anything 'irreversibly' or subject to any strong regulation; thus in order to sell quickly and on a massive scale, the governments involved have to offer extraordinarily attractive conditions, often in the form of generous incentives or 'give-away prices'.
14. Hector Schamis, Re-Forming the State, The Politics of Privatization in Latin America and Europe, Michigan 2002, chs 2-4.
15. Luigi Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, Oxford 1999, pp. 120-1.
16. The IMF programme for Argentina in 1988-89 recommended structural reforms including privatization and preferential terms for international banks. See Mario Rapoport, Historia económica, política y social de la Argentina, Buenos Aires 2005.
17. Ernest Bartell, 'Privatization: The Role of Domestic Business Elites', in Werner Baer and Melissa Birch, eds, Privatization in Latin America: New Roles for the Public and Private Sectors, Westport, CT 1994.
18. Miguel Ramirez, 'Privatization and the Role of the State in Post-ISI Mexico', in Baer and Birch, Privatization in Latin America.
19. For discussion of this aspect see Maria Victoria Murillo, 'Political Bias in Policy Convergence: Privatization Choices in Latin America', World Politics, vol. 54, no. 4 (July 2002), pp. 462-93.
20. Stephan Haggard and Sylvia Maxfield, 'The Political Economy of Financial Internationalization in the Developing World', in Robert Keohane and Helen Milner, eds, Internationalization and Domestic Politics, Cambridge 1996, p. 215.
21. The distinction between 'accumulation through expansion' and 'accumulation through encroachment' is taken from Prahat Patnaik, 'The Economics of the New Phase of Imperialism', paper presented at the Ankara conference on 'Acts of Resistance from the South against Globalization', 5-7 September 2005.
22. Though it should be noted that the boundary between resident and foreign capital has been blurred: 'domestic business elites in many Latin American countries have learned to behave as international investors after many years of capital flight': Bartell, 'Privatization: The Role of Domestic Business Elites', p. 86.
23. Benu Schneider, Resident Capital Outflows: Capital Flight or Normal Flows? A Statistical Interpretation, London 2003.
24. In Mexico, for example, privatization was justified by the need to finance the National Solidarity Programme. See Murillo, 'Political Bias in Policy Convergence', p. 484.
25. Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, p. 134.
26. Murillo, Labour Unions, Partisan Coalitions and Market Reforms in Latin America, Cambridge 2001.
27. Edward Gibson, 'The Populist Road to Market Reform: Policy and Electoral Coalitions in Mexico and Argentina', World Politics, vol. 49, no. 3 (April 1997), pp. 358-9.
28. As Hector Schamis notes, 'the strategic quality of this alliance became explicit in February 1993, when at a dinner with 27 of the country's wealthiest men . . . Salinas asked each of them to donate $25 million for the 1994 electoral campaign': Re-Forming the State, pp. 121-2.
29. The initial phase of protection demanded by the Mexican government was 20-30 years, but it compromised under 'intense pressure from US financial and banking companies, which originally wanted all restrictions removed within one year': Ramirez, 'Privatization in Post-ISI Mexico', p. 35.
30. See Baer and Villela, 'Privatization and the Changing Role of the State in Brazil'.
31. Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, p. 213.
32. Both quoted in Manzetti, Privatization South American Style, pp. 275, 71.
33. Figures from World Bank database; figures for Peru: 0.44 in 1990, 0.52 in 2003; Venezuela: 0.42 in 1993, 0.48 in 2003.
34. Emir Sader, 'The Weakest Link?', NLR 52, July-Aug 2008, p. 5.