In 2004, the Rafael del Pino Foundation decided to grant a Rafael del Pino Chair to Germà Bel, Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Barcelona. According to the Agreement signed on 17 March 2004, the objective of the Chair was the development by Professor Bel of research under the title "State and market: privatisation, regulation and competition". According to this agreement, the results of the Chair were to be translated into a book on public sector reform, focusing on local services in Spain. This book is now being published under the title "Economía y Política de la Privatización local", within the Foundation's Economics and Business Collection. The research has taken place at Cornell University, as a visiting professor, and at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, as a visiting scholar.
This is a work on local privatisation in Spain, since the issue is important, has gained relevance in recent years and there is still no work in our country that has dealt with it in a comprehensive manner from the perspective of economic and political analysis. On the other hand, the important administrative tradition in Spain has meant that the issue of private contracting of public services, including those of a local nature, is more present in the legal literature.
Professor Bel points out that privatisation in Spain has been of interest to academics and public policy analysts, but that this research effort and the resulting output has been almost exclusively devoted to privatisation through the sale of public enterprises, a field in which Spanish economic policy has been very active, while the efforts devoted to analysing aspects related to local privatisation in Spain have been much more modest and their translation into scientific publications practically non-existent. However, the way in which local services are produced, and especially services such as water supply or the collection and transport of solid waste, is of indisputable importance for people's quality of life, and also influences the potential for economic growth and cohesion of local communities. Moreover, these services have acquired considerable economic importance, mobilising substantial financial resources and employment. In recent decades there has been a profound transformation in the way local services are produced in cities and towns in Spain, as in many other countries. There is no precise and systematic information on the historical extent of private production in local services, although it is known that at the beginning of the 1980s in large cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Bilbao or Zaragoza it was private companies that produced the solid waste service. However, despite the undoubted importance of these unique experiences, the extent of private production was relatively small. In contrast, the data obtained in the course of this research indicate that, in the last 25 years, private production has become the majority form of production in services such as solid waste, and has a weight of more than a third of the municipalities and 40% of the population in the urban water supply service.
The main objective of Professor Bel's work is to contribute to the extension of knowledge and analysis of local privatisation in Spain. Furthermore, it aims to contribute to providing those responsible for local governments and administrations, both political and technical, with a useful tool for reflection and illustrative information on the use of privatisation for the reform of the local public sector and, more generally, as an instrument of reform at any level of government, since all of them are susceptible to the use of concession systems for the production of services that are publicly provided.
This is a work that is grounded in economic, theoretical and empirical analysis. The book is structured to answer the three general questions that underpin this research: What is privatisation and what has been its scope, why has privatisation been adopted, and what effects has it had? The concluding chapter is oriented towards two different objectives: first, it summarises in an articulated way the results obtained throughout the book, so that answers to the questions that lie at the origin of this research can be sketched; finally, it draws some more general lessons for public sector economics and policy, especially in the area of the intersection between governments and markets.
In addition to the book, the researcher has made progress with the preparation of the working documents foreseen in the framework of the project. Among the different working documents that Professor Bel has worked on during his time in the Chair, the following stand out due to their direct connection with the content of the project:
- Airport management and airline competition in OECD countries
- An analysis of municipal expenditure on municipal solid waste services
- Do public sector reforms get rusty? Local privatization in Spain
- The coining of 'privatisation' and Germany's National Socialist Party
- Access pricing to a digital broadcast platform
- Political and economic determinants of public service financing
- Preventing competition because of "solidarity": rhetoric and reality of airport investments in Spain
- Monopoly or competition?: comparing US and Spanish local privatisation
- Getting there fast: globalisation, intercontinental flights and location of headquarters
- Against the mainstream: Nazi privatisation in 1930s Germany
- What Happened to cost savings? Evidence from local privatization
- Factors explaining local privatisation: A meta-analysis