Governance, Regulation, and Privatization in the Asia-Pacific Region

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been an acceleration in the move from government regulation toward privatization. Governance, Regulation, and Privatization in the Asia-Pacific Region is the first thoroughgoing account of the relative success of the different approaches to privatization as undertaken in Korea, China, Australia, and Japan. In most contexts, privatization is expected to yield greater efficiency and cost effectiveness while avoiding the corruption and bloated budgets of government regulation or monopoly control. But broad-scale privatization, as implemented in East Asia, has also yielded its share of difficulties when ill-designed. Due to a lack of both legal infrastructure and management guidelines, privatization sometimes created a vacuum in corporate governance for some of the region's most important industries and in some cases merely reinstated monopoly-like configurations. The papers presented in this book analyze the experiences of privatization in several industries, including railroads and telecoms, as well as corporate governance problems, accounting issues, and challenges for the future in East Asia.