| Economic policy and the transition from authoritarian rule in the Philippines : an examination of the privatization of government corporations (1993) | |||||||||||||||||
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| This is a study about the political economy of redemocratization in less developed countries (LDCs). It investigates the politics and economics of restructuring government corporations, as the Philippines returned to representative democracy in 1986. It does so by adopting an expanded version of theories of rent-seeking to explain choices and implementation of privatization policies. The study challenges most works on privatization which primarily attribute slow progress to economic constraints. Instead, it argues that reformist pressures and implementation barriers obtain from explicit calculations of material and political gain by rent-seeking groups. Private and state-based rentiers significantly determine the substantive content as well as the timing and direction of policy reforms, when they are politically valued by fledgling and beleaguered democratic regimes. But rentierism also multiplies under a democratic regime that seeks to end the economic excesses of one-man rule by re-establishing the primacy of business enterprise. The study suggests that the greater challenge to LDCs is to widen public access to state resources and enhance competitive prowess. | |||||||||||||||||
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