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By the late eighties the British Treasury was receiving annual revenue from privatization sales averaging
$8 billion, while total government revenue was roughly $300 billion. The revenues from privatization helped
the Thatcher government cut income taxes over the decade from a bottom rate of 33 per cent down to 25 per
cent, and from a top rate of 98 per cent down to 40 per cent.
Other countries were anxious to share these advantages for their own state industries. Foreign privatization
ranged from massive sales in advanced countries such as France and Japan to the sale of hundreds of small en-
terprises in developing countries such as Bangladesh.
The French program took place in the "cohabitation" period of a socialist president and a conservative
prime minister. It was passed in mid-1986, with the first sale, glassmaker Saint Gobain, in December of that
year. This, like the sale of the banking group Paribas in February 1987, was a huge success, attracting so much
popular support that the shares were heavily oversubscribed, like the British sales.
The first nine companies were successfully sold before the world stock market slide of 1987 brought a halt
to the French program. The French copied the British idea of reserving at least 10 per cent of the shares for the
work force, and of keeping a "golden share", a single share retained by the government, to prevent foreigners
from gaining control of strategic industries.
Japan mounted large-scale privatizations, including its tobacco and salt monopoly in 1984; its telephone
service (NTT), floated in 1986; and following that, Japan National Railways (JNR), the world's biggest sale.
JNR was broken into six regional passenger carriers, one freight company, one firm to lease high-speed bullet
trains to four of the others, and a ninth company to sell JNR landholdings, estimated at $50 billion. No ad-
vanced economy outside Britain even approached this scale of privatization.
Following the collapse of communism in eastern and central Europe, first Poland, Hungary, and Czecho-
slovakia, then Romania and several of the former Soviet republics began to privatize. The problems in these
economies, blighted by more than forty years of command planning and central controls, were very different
from those faced by the advanced economies. Decades of low wages meant that little wealth was available for
investment, and no stock markets existed on which to make sales. Very often, there were no laws to protect or
even permit private ownership, much less the supporting infrastructure of contract law and financial support
services such as banks and accountants.
For this reason the formerly socialist economies found themselves forced to blaze a new trail of privatiza-
tion, sometimes using the distribution of "coupons" to the population as a means of spreading ownership. Very
often some degree of "informal" privatization was permitted, in which management effectively expropriated
what had been state property. Unlike Britain, which had about 10 per cent of its economy in state hands and had
sold three-fifths of it over ten years, the socialist countries were now faced with privatizing 60 to 80 per cent of
their economies within half that time. The scale and the problems were of altogether different proportions.
By the beginning of the nineties, hardly a country in the world did not have a privatization program. Many
countries learned from the experience of the early leaders. These included the techniques of writing off past
debts, allocating shares to workers, splitting monopolies into competing elements, and establishing new regula-
tory agencies to calm public fears about the behavior of the newly privatized operations.
By restoring market incentives and commercial reality, privatization achieved a worldwide reinvigoration
of ailing state-owned industries. It diverted billions of dollars from the support of loss-making government con-
cerns into the expansion of wealth-creating private businesses. It augmented growth rates and made tax reduc-
tions possible. Britain, which in the seventies had one of the lowest growth rates in Europe, has enjoyed one of
the highest since 1981.
It went from one of the highest-taxed countries to one of the lowest. Privatization contributed, in large
measure, to the revival of confidence in capitalism and the market economy, evidenced by the large number of
countries which turned in that direction and to its eventual triumph over the rival system of central planning,
controls, and state ownership.
REAGANOMICS
By William A. Niskanen
"Reaganomics" was the most serious attempt to change the course of U.S. economic policy of any admini-
stration since the New Deal. "Only by reducing the growth of government", said Ronald Reagan, "can we in-
crease the growth of the economy". Reagan's 1981 Program for Economic Recovery had four major policy ob-
jectives: 1) reduce the growth of government spending, 2) reduce the marginal tax rates on income from both
labor and capital, 3) reduce regulation and 4) reduce inflation by controlling the growth of the money supply.
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