Setting out the store

摘要

The past quarter of a century has seen several bursts of selling by the world's governments, mostly but not always in benign market conditions. Those in the oecd, a rich-country club, divested plenty of stuff in the 20 years before the global financial crisis. The first privatisation wave, which built up from the mid-1980s and peaked in 2000, was largely European. The drive to cut state intervention under Margaret Thatcher in Britain soon spread to the continent. The movement gathered pace after 1991, when eastern Europe put thousands of rusting state-owned enterprises (soes) on the block. A second wave came in the mid-2ooos, as European economies sought to cash in on buoyant markets.