INTRODUCTION

The nineteenth century saw a few utopian socialist experiments, and Victorians uncontroversially resorted to municipal ownership in a wide range of public utilities. In the twentieth century, a remarkable series of political experiments with nationalisation has given applied economists and historians an even richer variety of material for investigation and encouraged systematic empirical investigation of the record of different systems of ownership. In the communist bloc, whole economies were transformed from semi-feudal or capitalist market economies to socialist planned economies, of many varieties. They shared the common characteristic that the material means of production were largely owned by the state and many basic allocative decisions – on consumer choice as well as allocations of investment – were made centrally. By the end of the 1980s the economic inefficiency and political bankruptcy of such socio-political systems precipitated their widespread collapse and/or extensive marketisation.

Yet experience of state ownership has not been confined to the totalitarian socialist countries. Among the liberal democracies, there was a wide range of state ownership, though their powers were usually somewhat less than in Soviet central planning. There are considerable problems in measuring the size of the state-owned industry sector in different economies, not least because of the variations in national statistical definitions of these industries (Pathirane and Blades 1982). Nonetheless, it is clear that Britain did not have an unusually high degree of public ownership, by European standards, even at the peak of public ownership before the 1980s privatisation programme began.