This paper examines the effects of market restructuring initiatives that introduced competition into the United States electricity industry on the thermal efficiency of electricity generation. An empirical model is estimated on annual data for over 950 plants from 1996 to 2006. Model estimates show that access to wholesale electricity markets and retail choice together increased the efficiency of investor-owned plants by about nine percent and that these gains stem from organizational and technological changes within the plant. Although not directly targeted by restructuring initiatives, similar efficiency gains are also found for municipality-owned plants. This result suggests that the potential benefits from competition have spilled over to public electricity generation.
The programme of state enterprise privatisation pursued by the Zambian government since 1992 has been subject to a number of conflicting evaluations. For some it is a model programme, ‘the most successful in Africa’ (Campbell White and Bhatia, 1998), which stands as an example to other developing countries. For others, it is a deeply flawed experience which allowed for the corrupt acquisition of assets by those linked to the ruling party. This paper argues that these conflicting evaluations are the result of two underlying processes which reflected the political and economic environment in which the policy was implemented. This required the Zambian government to balance, on the one hand, the demands of northern donors and the Bretton Woods institutions that international capital should be provided with an attractive and secure environment for investment and, on the other hand, those in the ruling party's domestic constituency who regarded privatisation as an opportunity for personal accumulation.
During the s, African governments sought to translate their commitment to privatise state enterprises into action. In doing so, they faced questions concerning the form in which these enterprises would be sold, to whom and on what terms. This paper examines the privatisation of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM) between and . It argues that the capacity of the Zambian government to determine the answers to these questions was constrained by a number of factors, of which the most important were the strategies pursued by potential purchasers, the demands of donors and the financial weakness of ZCCM itself.
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