The Political Economy of Privatization in Turkey: An Evaluation

Against the backdrop of major changes in Turkey's development strategy and policy regimes, the paper provides an assessment of the aggregate performance of the non financial state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector, and examines the nature and process of reform initiatives during the decade of 1985-95. The paper argues that the performance of the SOE sector should be evaluated not only against the background of its institutional framework, but also in relation to the economic policy mix at the macro level. In this vein, the recently revised SOE data have been processed in a form that matches the policy cycle identified in the 1985-95 period. The analysis brings out the strong sensitivity of SOE financial indicators to changes in major policy characteristics, including Government's stance on income distribution, real wages and modes of deficit financing. Following the assessment of overall SOE performance over time, the paper critically reviews Turkey's privatization experience, examines legal setbacks, and documents major asset sales and related expenditures. The implications of the present analysis for future SOE reform are also discussed.

Privatization not only results in the transfer of state assets, but it also reduces economic role of the government. Developing and developed countries have experienced privatization in different ways for years. This article focuses upon the issue of privatization in Turkey. Turkey launched its comprehensive economic liberalization program named ‘structural adjustment reform' in 1980 by the stimulation of the World Bank and IMF. Later on, privatization has been an official state ideology with two institutions, the Privatization Higher Council and the Privatization Administration. Some of their implementations have been given. Privatization policies have multiple, often together with often inter-related and conflicting political, economic and financial objectives. They must be evaluated according to political, social and economical structures and conditions of the country concerned. Together with privatization, competition and its institutional framework with implementations have also been analyzed in the paper. The paper maintains that there seemed no direct and strong relationship between the privatization endeavours and institutional competition. Finally, the study points out that Turkey seems to be a bare-foot runner in its privatization venture unless there is a proper competitive market, together with a sound social security system and a profound capital market.

One of the most important and distinctive themes of Lacey’s recent work has been the analysis of penal practices from the perspective of political economy. However, it is arguably the case that ‘political economy’ is primarily viewed as a dimension of the context in which the criminal law develops rather than as a method of legal analysis. In this chapter I explore the meaning and critical potential of the concept of political economy—how it is used by Lacey, the different traditions that she draws on—and what the perspective and theory of political economy contributes to our understanding of criminal law. I seek to deepen the relevance of political economy to the analysis of criminal responsibility by exploring how the development of the modern conception of English criminal law in the early nineteenth century was itself shaped by contemporary understandings of political economy. Most historical work on the development of the modern criminal law has focused on the impact of utilitarianism to show how changes in penal laws and institutions were linked to new efforts to shape individual conduct in society. However, equally important to the intellectual and political culture of the early nineteenth century were understandings of the new ‘science’ of political economy. This chapter explores the ways in which theories of political economy shaped the modern criminal law in this period and thereby to open up new possibilities for exploring connections between criminal law, criminal responsibility, and political economy—and thus for critical criminal law theory.

Disentangling liberalization and privatization policies: Is there a political trade-off?

Privatization has been on a lot of countr ies' agenda, especially for the emerging countries for a long time. In Turkey, as an emergin g country, privatization plan has been a very high priority among the State Budget income items f or three decades. To identify and to explore the accounting role in privatization is the critical issue for the countries under privatization process. In this study, the importance of financial reporting d uring privatization process is examined. The overall responsibility of accounting in privatizati on is to develop investor confidence to channel the flows of funds and to ensure the effective and effi cient use of capital funds. Therefore, without a sound accountancy framework, the privatization proc ess would not generate the desired long term economic, social, and financial development results . Therefore, we analyzed the period of Turkish privatization experience by underlying the importan ce of financial reporting in this process. For this purpose, in the first part of the study, we defined the privatization and argued the positive and negative opinions about it. In the second part, we clarified the role of accounting in privatization process under disclosure, transitional problems, tr aining, valuation problems, and inflation accounting subsections. In the third part, we dis cussed the recent accounting developments which may effects privatization in Turkey. In the fourth part, we summarized the implementation of privatization in Turkey. Then, we mentioned the key issues in privatization process for emerging economies. Based on the Turkey's privatization prac tices, financial reporting has a very important role in the SOE's privatization process. In our poi nt of view, since accounting has an important role in privatization, this role takes place before , during and also after the privatization. It shoul d be taken into consideration that the main objective of privatization is not only to privatize SOE's, but also keep the sustainability of privatized SOE' s. While privatization creates sources for new investments of the governments, it should support t he effectiveness and economics of goods and services in the area of privatization. So the susta inability of privatized companies is very important as well as their sales. All of the above purposes c an be controlled by solely accounting.

In the 1980s public policy shifted sharply in favor of market-based solutions, in contrast to the previously dominant “Keynesian” approach to economic management. A number of countries, irrespective of their regimes or stages of development, are currently implementing programs designed to reduce the size and scope of the public sector and strengthen the market. The privatization of public enterprises constitutes a key element in such a strategy.1 Yet hitherto, the extent of privatization—the number of enterprises involved as well as the scale of divestiture—has been extremely limited, especially considering the amount of rhetoric the idea has generated. In addition, the vigor with which privatization policies have been pursued also shows considerable variation among countries. These “stylized facts” of privatization clearly merit an explanation.2 Here I will look for that explanation by using the Turkish experience with privatization between 1980 and 1989 as a case study.

Network policy formation between idealist and strategic models: a political economy perspective from Turkey

Looking at women's power in the home, in the workplace, and in politics from a political economy perspective, Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth demonstrate that equality is tied to demand for women's labour outside the home, which is a function of structural, political, and institutional conditions. They go on to explain several anomalies of modern gender politics: why women vote differently from men; why women are better represented in the workforce in the United States than in other countries but less well represented in politics; why men share more of the household work in some countries than in others; and, why some countries have such low fertility rates. The first book to integrate the micro-level of families with the macro-level of national institutions, Women, Work, and Politics presents an original and groundbreaking approach to gender inequality.

Organized around the theme “Rethinking Economic Analysis: The Perspective of Political Economy,” the 15th Forum of the World Association for Political Economy was hosted by the World Association for Political Economy and the Shanghai International Studies University on December 18 and 19, 2021. Nearly 300 scholars from more than 40 countries discussed in depth the topics of Marxist and capitalist economics; the crisis and criticism of capitalism; envisioning socialism; socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era; agricultural problems; ecological problems and new economic forms from the perspective of political economy; the plight of developing countries and how to solve it; political and economic considerations related to COVID-19; multipolarization, and geopolitical economy. The scholars attending the forum put forward many scientific theories and policy suggestions, which strengthened the position of Marxist political economy and provided an important ideological weapon helping working people all over the world to unite against the irrational capitalist system and the hegemonic acts of the new imperialism, while promoting the construction of a community with a shared future for mankind and the creation of a new form of human civilization.

ABSTRACTEnvironmental and resource sociology has long featured political economy perspectives among its diverse theoretical retinue. Whether based on treadmills, modernization or other frameworks, political economy perspectives have influenced a growing body of environmental and resource sociology research. Recent reviews of environmental and resource sociology offer broad evaluations of the evolving state of the field, highlighting political economy theories and research needs. In this paper, we complement those reviews by suggesting a selection of specific topics informed in various ways by political economy perspectives as future directions in environmental and resource sociology. We prioritize research questions as applications of political economy perspectives to additional issues, sometimes via cross-fertilizations with other theoretical approaches, and thereby offer innovative directions for future research. The four topics are (1) food justice, critical animal studies and the industrial food system; (2) green criminology; (3) social media, social movements and environmental change; and (4) performativity. For each topic, we overview foundational arguments, noting relationships to political economy thought and briefly reviewing recent empirical work, before proposing specific research questions to inform future inquiry. While other topics are indeed valuable, we suggest that the assets of those we feature offer particularly innovative and fruitful directions. We conclude by discussing other research topics that also present intriguing opportunities.

Reviewed by: After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy Peter Mandler (bio) After Adam Smith: A Century of Transformation in Politics and Political Economy, by Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimson; pp. x + 306. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009, $35.00, £24.95. Thirty years ago the history of political economy played a central role in Victorian studies. The social concerns that had driven the rise of Victorian studies since the Second World War led to vigorous scholarly debates about population growth, industrialization, class, poor laws, factories, laissez faire, and state intervention. An understanding of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and J. S. Mill was crucial to an understanding of the terms in which the Victorians dealt with these questions. Looking forward, even the history of Victorian social criticism from Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin to the origins of the Labour party couldn't be understood except in the context of continuities with as well as reactions against classical political economy. Looking backward, a rediscovery of Smith's civic-republican and civic-moralist roots helped to explain his curious relevance to the left as much as to the right up to the present day. As late as the 1980s, the work of Donald Winch, Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, Boyd Hilton, and others added vigorously to our understanding of the complexities of the Scottish Enlightenment and the ways in which its thinking was embedded in Victorian social and political thought as well as social and political reform. It is fair to say that all of these questions—and their answers—appear rather shopworn today. The social concerns of the postwar decades, revolving around class, have been substantially displaced by new concerns for nation, race, and gender. The hegemony of neoclassical economics since the 1980s has, oddly, put its critics off from examining its classical roots—it was more comfortable, perhaps, to look away. Postmodernism's interest in political economy stretched only so far as was necessary to explode its naive epistemology; exploring its inner workings seemed irrelevant at best, a trap that might draw you back into the system at worst. After Adam Smith, by Murray Milgate and Shannon C. Stimson, seeks to rectify this omission. Aimed explicitly at neoclassical economists' misunderstanding and misappropriation of Smith's legacy, it seeks both to restore Smith's concepts to the late-eighteenth-century context in which they developed and to show how subsequent generations revised those concepts for their own uses and their own contexts—particularly in the immediate, early-nineteenth-century aftermath of Smith's own time. Despite the title, more than a third of the book is devoted to Smith himself, to his ideas about economic growth, liberty, and civil society, and to the wide variety of possible relations between economics and politics. By the authors' own admission, the analysis here rests heavily on Winch's pioneering work. They then move on, in their most interesting chapter, to Dugald Stewart's representation of Smith, narrowing a loose and suggestive body of thought into a science of legislation—"and economic legislation at that" (109). Subsequent chapters remind us that Stewart did not have the last word. Malthus's introduction of the population question—a specific polemical animus against 1790s [End Page 319] utopianism—was claimed both as an elaboration of and as a repudiation of Smith's legacy. James Mill's and Ricardo's applications of utilitarianism to political economy is shown to have ambiguous implications for the idea of democracy. At this point, Milgate and Stimson temporarily abandon the legacy of Smith as a focal point for the book—reasonably enough given the radical transformations in the political environment between the 1770s and the 1820s. They resume the Smithian theme in a discussion of how far the dynamic elements of Smith's thinking were affected by early-nineteenth-century utopianism and ideas about the stationary state. In an unusual deviation from the canonical figures, Milgate and Stimson then consider Ricardian socialism—or, rather, one particular Ricardian socialist, Thomas Hodgskin—and the relationship of radical political economy to Smith and Ricardo. Returning to the earlier discussion of utilitarianism, they consider J. S. Mill...

Following the Arab Spring, Egypt and Tunisia face very difficult economic situations that risk affecting the economic viability of their political transitions. Morocco and Algeria, meanwhile, have both experienced rioting and there is growing uncertainty as to how their economic policies might evolve in the future. This is especially so in Morocco, where tough economic decisions are almost as urgent as in Tunisia and Egypt. Libya faces the distinct challenge of managing its resource wealth from a ground-zero institutional setting. Mauritania is following a different political economy path and will therefore not be analyzed here. From the point of view of political economy, a crucial point is whether the wave of popular revolts that overthrew the incumbent regimes will consolidate into economically viable liberal democracies, and in what economic direction Algeria and Morocco will move since to date they have been spared the enormous fiscal cost of regime change. In other words, the question is whether democratization can be maintained (or continue to be pursued) under current political economy conditions, with the full array of economic structures, institutions, interests and preferences of the various players in society at play.

Die Fahigkeit einer Regierung, Reformen trotz groser Widerstande erfolgreich zu initiieren und durchzufuhren, war in Brasilien — ahnlich wie in Deutschland — in der Vergangenheit nicht immer gegeben. Im ersten Amtsjahr der Regierung Lula konnte jedoch eine auserst bedeutende und kontroverse Reform in Brasilien umgesetzt werden. In diesem Artikel werden die Erfolgsfaktoren der Reform der Beamten- Alterssicherung aus einer polit-okonomischen Perspektive analysiert. Vier zentrale Faktoren konnen fur den Erfolg der Reform identifiziert werden. Ein abschliesender Blick auf die jungsten Reformbemuhungen der Regierung Lula soll klaren, welche Reformerfolge in naher Zukunft unter Berucksichtigung der institutionellen Rahmenbedingungen Brasiliens noch erwartet werden konnen.

Within the last two decades, 40% of rangelands in Uzbekistan have been taken out of use due to non-functioning water facilities and pasture degradation. A retrospective study of rangeland production system development in the former Soviet Union (FSU) shows that the pasture land was used more productively, socio-economic benefits were created in rural areas, and land degradation was effectively addressed. Considering that pasture lands are a common-pool resource, which – following the current discourse – might be best used by local communities, the question arises as to how the highly centralized Soviet system was able to achieve a very productive use. The historical analysis presented in this paper shows that this was achieved by means of (a) making intensive use of agricultural research on the one hand, and (b) setting-up an effective institutional structure, on the other. This paper aims at highlighting the role of agricultural research as well as institutional mechanism that allowed Soviets to manage common-pool resources productively, taking into account the political incentives to make such a system work. The paper also asks the question why lessons from the past were not derived to move the current transition reforms for the pastoral system in a direction that allows for a sustainable and productive use of this system. To better understand the current trends of change in dryland pastoral systems in a broader context of institutional reform, the current transition reforms and potential institutional options are discussed from a political economy perspective. Based on this approach, alternative options are derived for the further development of the rangeland production systems.

Thanks in large part to three nationwide surveys sponsored by the International City/ County Management Association in 1982, 1988, and 1992, we know a great deal about the extent of municipal privatization in the United States. These surveys, however, were not designed to explore the various nuances of municipal privatization, such as the extent of their satisfaction with privatization, why cities choose to privatize services, the extent to which privatization reduces service costs and improves service delivery, how privatization affects employee's compensation packages, how cities monitor the quality and effectiveness of privatized services, and what lessons city officials have learned from their privatization experiences. The authors fill this void in the literature by asking these questions and more of city officials in America's largest cities. Among their many findings, they discovered that while privatization is now an accepted, alternative means of delivering municipal services throughout the United States, it is by no means viewed as a panacea. Faced with increased demands for public services and strong resistance to further tax increases, city officials across the country have been forced to reexamine the way they provide city services in an attempt to save money and find ways to more with less. Echoing the themes raised in Osborne and Gaebler's now famous book, Reinventing Government (1993), city officials are shifting away from a focus on what government should do toward a focus on how government can get things done more efficiently and effectively. This new focus has contributed to the increased use of strategic planning initiatives that use citizen surveys, public hearings, and town meetings to help city officials define their cities' long-term objectives and develop a strategy to achieve those objectives (Below, Morrisey, and Acomb, 1987; Streib, 1990; Wheeland, 1993). This focus has also contributed to the privatization of city services and, in a recent development, the increased use of competitive bidding practices that pit the private sector against existing city agencies (Uchitelle, 1988). In this article, we enhance the knowledge of the privatization movement in the United States by reporting the results of a survey of the privatization experiences of America's largest cities. We compare and contrast this surveys results with the results of surveys on municipal privatization experiences conducted by the International City/County Management Association (ICMA) in 1982, 1988, and 1992. The ICMA's surveys asked respondents to indicate the extent of privatization within their cities, and they remain the most comprehensive sources of information on municipal privatization activities. They did not, however, attempt, as this survey does, to determine the cities, level of satisfaction with their privatization experiences, nor did they attempt to explore some of the nuances of the cities' privatization experiences, such as why they chose to privatize specific services and what privatizations impact has been on service delivery costs and the quality of services. Also, the ICMA surveys did not focus on the privatization activities of America's largest cities. Instead, they included cities of various population sizes as well as county governments. The Survey A three-page survey was mailed during the summer of 1995 to the office of the mayor, or to the city manager when appropriate, of the 100 American cities with the largest populations. The survey was designed to determine the extent of privatization within these cities, the level of satisfaction with their privatization experiences, the reasons they privatized services, the extent to which privatization reduced service costs and improved service delivery, the effect of privatization on employees' compensation packages, the way cities monitored the quality and effectiveness of privatized services, and the lessons they had learned from their privatization experiences. …