Privatisation in Europe

Public provision of essential public services such as transport, water and electricity was the norm across Europe for much of the twentieth century. The last 30 years or so, however, have witnessed a radical break with this tradition, as a number of economic and political factors have led to a reconsideration of the precise role of the state in public service delivery. High on the agenda of many governments has been the reform of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Measures adopted to address perceived problems in the SOE sector include those designed to increase the degree of competition faced by SOEs (through deregulation and liberalisation, for example), alter the nature of regulation (for example, price and access regulation), and change ownership structures through privatisation. Of these changes, the privatisation of SOEs has been the most high profile and often the most controversial. It has brought about enormous industrial restructuring, with whole industries transferred to the private sector, and the role of the state often transformed from that of monopolistic service provider to that of regulator. Privatisation has also had significant redistributional effects in terms of impacting on the availability and prices of public services, as well as transferring non-trivial amounts of benefits to certain categories of stakeholders.