ИПИ Библиотека

The book presents the growing role of privatization for both developed and developing countries. There are many reasons for this, but the most important have to do with a combination of growing pressures on public budgets and mounting evidence that the competitive discipline of private markets increase efficiency, producing greater quality at a lower cost. Even the socialist countries have thus been affected by the movement, and the pressure for privatization have surfaced in almost all of the Eastern Bloc countries.

"This book is meant to be a "handbook" on privatization. The papers in it were presented at a major conference on privatization, which took place in February 1986 in Washington, D. C. The conference, which was sponsored by the U. S. Agency for International Development (AID) and organized by the Sequoia Institute, was noteworthy for several reasons. First, the more than 500 participants that attended from all over the world represented a wide and rare spectrum of professions, viewpoints, and countries. Rarely have such a diverse group of scholars, politicians, public-sector bureaucrats, and private investors joined in such an effort. The conference was also interesting as its central purpose represented an implicit critique of some of AID's own past policies, and it spoke with the increasing voice of recognition that good economic policies are more important than any form of aid in encouraging economic and social development."

Steve H. Hanke

Steve H. Hanke is Contributing Editor of The Independent Review, Professor of Applied Economics and Co-Director of the Institute for Applied Economics and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University, and a Forbes magazine columnist. Dr. Hanke received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Colorado, and his interests include currency, commodity and capital markets. He has taught economics at the University of California at Berkeley and the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado, is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and has held other senior research positions at universities and research institutes in Austria, France, Israel, Kenya, Sweden and the U.S.A.

Professor Hanke is a Principal at Chicago Partners, LLC, a Chicago-based firm that provides economic and accounting advice in the areas of securities, intellectual property, antitrust, business torts and other complex litigation disputes. He is also Chairman Emeritus at the Friedberg Mercantile Group, Inc. in Toronto. In the past, he served as Chairman of the Friedberg Mercantile Group, Inc. and President of Toronto Trust Argentina, the world’s best performing emerging market mutual fund in 1995. In those capacities, he was responsible for developing strategies for trading foreign exchange, commodities and a wide variety of securities. He has advised leaders from many countries on currency and regulatory reform, privatization, public finance and capital market development: Albania, Argentina, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Ecuador, Estonia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Montenegro, Venezuela and Yugoslavia. He also served as a Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisors.

He is the author of numerous articles on economics and finance, is a Contributing Editor for Central Banking,Globe Asia and The International Economy, and serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals. He was named one of the world’s twenty-five most influential people by World Trade magazine in 1998. A contributing author to the Independent Institute book, Money and the Nation State: The Financial Revolution, Government and the World Monetary System, his books include Alternative Monetary Regimes for Jamaica, Capital Markets and Development, Currency Boards for Developing Countries, Juntas Monetarias para Pafses en Desarollo, Privatization and Development, Prospects for Privatization and Russian Currency and Finance.