“A fundamental difficulty with the government is that there is no owner of the residual. There is no one who directly benefits from delivering a product cheaply, or from making a new or higher quality product.”
^Almost true. A dictator (or family, eg Singapore) could in principle earn the residual to efficient government.
The adjacent and more pressing problem is that the people who do have control and sometimes residual rights cannot trade them. Through trade we get prices and prices help us make efficient decisions.
" Electricity consumption (a weak indicator anyway, as there was little incentive to economize on electricity) fell by considerably less than GDP fell. Household consumption measures – like ownership of automobiles and other consumer durables, or living space, increased after the fall."
No, their method is different. The papers I cite are comparing the change in various dependent variables for a particular firm after privatizing, not simply regressing countrywide policies on countrywide outcomes.
"So too have the harms from privatization, exaggerated in the West by those reflexively opposed to markets."
A lot of the criticism of the privatisation is specifically about the privatisation inside Russia specifically and as you say that privatisation was done in a corrupt manner and had a negative effect on the economy.
This is important because it's another case of USA being a very bad influence when messing with another country affair's.
“A fundamental difficulty with the government is that there is no owner of the residual. There is no one who directly benefits from delivering a product cheaply, or from making a new or higher quality product.”
^Almost true. A dictator (or family, eg Singapore) could in principle earn the residual to efficient government.
The adjacent and more pressing problem is that the people who do have control and sometimes residual rights cannot trade them. Through trade we get prices and prices help us make efficient decisions.
" Electricity consumption (a weak indicator anyway, as there was little incentive to economize on electricity) fell by considerably less than GDP fell. Household consumption measures – like ownership of automobiles and other consumer durables, or living space, increased after the fall."
Some numbers here would be nice.
Don't both Brown, Earle, and Telegdy (2006) and Claessens and Djankov (2002) suffer from the criticism in Section 4 of https://drodrik.scholar.harvard.edu/sites/scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/the_new_economics_of_ip_081423.pdf#page=14 / https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/dani-rodrik/files/why-we-learn-regressing-nothing-by-regressinggrowthonpolicies.pdf ?
I'm not sure given that IANAE, so please lmk. Thanks in advance :)
No, their method is different. The papers I cite are comparing the change in various dependent variables for a particular firm after privatizing, not simply regressing countrywide policies on countrywide outcomes.
"So too have the harms from privatization, exaggerated in the West by those reflexively opposed to markets."
A lot of the criticism of the privatisation is specifically about the privatisation inside Russia specifically and as you say that privatisation was done in a corrupt manner and had a negative effect on the economy.
This is important because it's another case of USA being a very bad influence when messing with another country affair's.
But it was an overall good to have those Russian industries privately owned and priced, rather than public.