Case studies on privatisation of public services, pfi, ppp etc.

The water supply service of Jakarta, capital city of Indonesia, was privatised in 1998, under the military dictatorship of Suharto. The service was divided, with half the city being assigned to each of two multinational companies –Thames Water, from the UK, and Suez, from France. There was no competitive tendering, but there was corruption: both Thames and Suez gave shares in their subsidiaries to companies owned by relatives and cronies of Suharto.

Short article by Arundhati Roy on World Bank-inspired privatisation in India. Read more: http://www.commonground.ca/iss/0406155/roy_excerpt.shtml

Professor Anil Sadgopal of the University of Delhi discusses the necessity of seeing education as something every child has a right to, and the neoliberal assault on that notion. Read more here: http://parisar.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/common-school-system-and-the-fut...

Corporate Watch investigates the effects of outsourcing company Serco's pathology joint venture with two London hospital trusts. With the number of clinical “incidents” apparently rising as experienced scientists are lost and not replaced, staff say morale is at “an all time low” and complain their new managers appear more concerned with marketing than laboratory work. Read more here: http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=4105

Informative review of The British Electricity Experiment, edited by John Surrey, discussing the impact of the privatisation of electricy in the UK.

By opening up to market competition, school meals in the UK switched from being a public provision to a private service, and services began to pursue the cheapest prices - or the highest profits. Read the full article here: http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=2048

James Meek looks at the privatisation of postal services in the Netherlands and the UK. Read the full article here: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office

SANTIAGO, CHILE--Privatization has been a Washington policymakers' buzzword since the early 1980s. The message is unequivocal: be it in the Third World, the Soviet Union or the United States, private is good, public is bad. Perhaps no country has had a longer and more thorough dose of privatization than Chile. Backed by the iron-fisted dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), economic policymakers, schooled in the free-market philosophy of the University of Chicago's Milton Friedman, carried out sweeping privatizations.

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