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between the government and its clients, i.e., labor organizations and businesses, is in
harmony with Murillo’s argument that privatizations are mainly political and politicized
processes.
Birch and Haar (2000), Murillo (2002) and Etchemendy’s (2001) exclusive focus
on Latin America does not mean that political privatizations are unique to Latin America,
even though this region along with the Caribbean account for almost 70 percent of
privatizations in the developing world (Cook and Kirkpatrick 1995, 42). Ghosh (2000)
and Gupta (2000), for instance, who examine privatization experiences of the ASEAN
region, are persuaded that privatizations involve much more political decisions than
economic, social, national or cultural issues (3). Appel (2000), lays out the ideological
mechanisms determining the design and implementation of privatization programs in the
post-communist countries. Saunders (1995) establishes that privatizations helped the
Conservative Party win a crucial electoral advantage over the Labor Party in Great
Britain. Suleiman and Waterbury (1995), in their extensive case studies from the Middle
East, Southeast Asia and Northern Africa, demonstrate that “public sector reform and
privatizations are organically linked to quintessentially political issues of public resource
allocation, provision of collective goods, and the distribution of wealth in society” (1).
Waterbury (1993), in an earlier work, reveals the political underpinnings of privatizations
as applied in Egypt, India, Mexico and Turkey. He claims that the degree of statism
present in political institutions have determined in these cases the resultant property
rights and interest group coalitions of privatizations.
Schamis’ (2002) work is a more recent analysis of the relationship between
privatizations and the issue of “stateness.” Defined as “the variation in the capacity of the
Convention