The Comparative Politics of Industrial Privatization: Spain, Portugal and Greece in a European Perspective

Privatization has been on the policy agenda of almost every country in the world, whatever the nature of its regime or its political hue.2 The purpose of this chapter is to place the industrial privatization programmes of Spain, Portugal and Greece in a European context in order to underline and explain their common as well as their distinctive characteristics.3 What ties these programmes together is that they have been geared towards a common objective of ‘catching up’ with the ongoing economic transformation inside the EC/EU. This transformation is driven by convergent pressures exercised more or less upon all West European economies over the 1980s and 1990s. Evidently, the differentiating factor of Southern European economies (SEEs) from the rest of EC/EU economies, and their own shared predicament, is that the distance to be covered is larger. ‘Catch-up’ in their case encompasses a double challenge: modernize to the point of being able to compete from an equal ground with the rest of Western Europe, and then successfully persevere the competition.