Why and When Do Governments Initiate Public Enterprise Reform?
提出一个基于合同理论的决策模型，认为政府启动公共企业改革取决于潜在效率收益和交易成本，并用15个发展中国家20年的数据检验了该模型。
Initiating public enterprise reform is a complex decision influenced by economic factors as well as the ideological biases and personalities of political leaders. Never-theless, the use of a contracting framework yields important generalizations about what drives the decision. This article argues that the decision depends fundamentally on the potential efficiency gains from the reform and its associated transactions costs. Costs arise because of asymmetries in information and opportunism, prob-lems that usually plague contract negotiations. The article identifies observable vari-ables that may affect either the potential gains or the transactions costs, uses them to construct a simple probit decision-making model, and tests the model using data from fifteen developing countries over a twenty-year period. In the last ten years considerable attention has been cast on public enterprises, much of it centering on their poor performance and the burden they impose on national treasuries. Yet in many countries, reform of such enterprises has pro-ceeded at a slow and uneven pace. Many governments have been reluctant to alter incentives within the public enterprise sector that would improve efficiency,