Documents, Literature, official statistics, Experts and Stakeholders / surveys and interviews.
a) Fiscal effects
This work package is concerned with research on the fiscal effects of privatization. As a basis for all further activities we have put forward a theoretical analysis of privatization incentives for government policy in an inter-temporal context with special emphasis on the role of budgetary institutions. This analysis asks, which kind of budgetary institutions will prevent policymakers from exploiting short-term liquidity gains from privatization in order to shift the burden of current fiscal policy into the future. Building on a seminal paper by Barro (1979) it was necessary to substantially extend the existing theoretical literature. As it turned out that the mechanism at work is more fundamental, the empirical test of the theory addresses public investment and disinvestment of lower lever governments in the US in general.
In order to approach the privatization by German municipalities a second step of the work was concerned with setting up an empirical framework that allows to address the fiscal determinants of privatisation in the German context and to compare this with the US case. The second paper, therefore, applies to the German case a framework for the analysis of fiscal adjustment, originally proposed by Bohn (1991) and applied to the case of sub-national governments by Buettner and Wildasin (2002).
A third paper then addresses the fiscal determinants of privatization for German municipalities. The empirical analysis considers the role of the long-term fiscal position as well of the current deficit for the privatization decisions as documented in the time path of privatization revenues.
Buettner, Thiess und David E. Wildasin, "Public Investment Shocks, and Borrowing Restrictions", Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik, 2010
Buettner, Thiess, 2008, "Equalization Transfers and Municipal Fiscal Adjustment: Results for Germany and a US-German Comparison", Journal of Comparative Economics 37 (3), 2009, 417-431
b) Valuation by Experts and Stakeholders
During the first reporting period Ifo developed two standardised questionnaires and carried out the two mail based surveys – one targeted on (300) European economic experts in Europe, the other one on (1000) German Managers of Enterprises.
During the second reporting period the results of the first two mail surveys were compiled and a brief Report submitted.
A questionnaire frame for the in-depth face-to-face interviews subsequently was developed, submitted to the Project Steering Committee and revised according to suggestions received from the Steering Committee. In autumn 07 and early 08, 57 in-depth interviews were carried out in 9 EU countries. A comprehensive Report was prepared and submitted to the Consortium leader by May 2008. A summary of the results was presented in the final UPP Conference in Milan. A revised version of the Report has been published.
Nerb, Gernot, Siegfried Schoenherr, Bennet Schroeder, Valuation of Privatization in Europe by Experts and Stakeholders: Results of Explorative Surveys and Interviews, ifo Forschungsberichte No. 43, Munich 2008 (Abstract)
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