The privatization of publicly owned and operated industries and services that has occurred in certain countries over the last forty or fifty years is routinely condemned on the political left, yet the grounds of that condemnation often remain unspecified. This is perhaps unsurprising, given the practical advantages of what Cass Sunstein has called “incompletely theorized agreements” in facilitating collective action. But the advantage of distinguishing between different kinds of objections is that doing so allows us to assess their implications independently and therefore weigh and balance different factors in our practical reasoning. Sometimes we might want to object to privatization on straightforward economic grounds: when Chicago sold its parking meters on a seventy-five-year lease for just $1.15 billion, giving up a long-term revenue stream in order to balance the budget for just one year, it seemed less like selling the family silver than selling the family silver mine.

State-owned enterprises account for sizable shares of global supply in many commodities. There is a common belief that these enterprises behave differently from privately owned supply agents. This claim must be investigated, which is the main aim of this chapter. The chapter continues by clarifying a few methodological issues. How precisely is state enterprise defined? We subsequently explore the motivations for establishing public ownership in the mineral and energy sectors, in industrialized as well as developing countries. Then, after pointing to the features that characterize state-owned mineral firms, we analyze the likely impact of state ownership in minerals and energy on the domestic economy, providing in the process the rationales for the wave of privatizations in metals and minerals and the shrinkage of state-owned enterprise in these industries after 1980. The chapter ends by discussing the impact of state ownership on the international markets for minerals and oil.

This chapter discusses alternative policy approaches that may be pertinent to digital platform markets at large. It evaluates the strengths and limits of ex ante regulation, franchise bidding, public ownership, and competition policy enforcement, and highlights critical institional constraints that set the limits of desirable policy approaches in digital industries. This chapter suggests in particular the neeed to support ex post enforcement with complementary forms of ex ante intervention.

Nordic countries have their own variations of the same corporate law theme, based on equality between shareholders and minority protection. However, U.S.-style shareholder primacy has influenced corporate practices, legal literature and governance codes. The strength of the ‘Nordic model’ is not in law or in codes, but in a typically Nordic form of ‘active ownership’ by non-institutional direct shareholders such as families, foundations and public pension funds. It is not, however, enough and requires broader participation for sustainability. The answer might be in corporate board activity. The Nordic ‘soft’ shareholder activism, based on a dialogue between the investors and the board, gives room for the boards to convince the investors of the advantages of long-term sustainability. Recurring Nordic bank crises show that bankers’ motives for profit maximisation should be particularly constrained.