published in: Journal of Development Studies, 2009, 45(3), 333-350
Privatization policy faces increasing popular opposition in Latin America. We test for the determinants of this discontent. We use the results of Latinobarometro (2002), a survey of a representative sample of 18522 individuals in 17 countries as our dependent variable of perception, and a privatization dataset on the same countries, including sectoral disaggregation of divestitures, time profiles, proceeds, and other variables for each country. We use as well a set of macroeconomic variables as controls.. Our main finding is that disagreement with privatization is more likely when the respondent is poor, privatization was large and quick, involved a high proportion of public services as water and electricity, the country suffered adverse macroeconomic shocks, and there is high inequality of incomes. The more the respondent is educated, the more adverse to privatization he or she is. We suggest that these results depict a broadly consistent picture of privatization discontent that points to distributional issues, probably because of tariff rebalancing not adequately addressed by policy makers and regulators, as suggested by earlier empirical papers. Further research is needed on the relationship between perceptions and actual welfare changes.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.