Exposed to Innumerable Delusions

The states of Egypt, India, Mexico and Turkey have all developed extensive public enterprise sectors and have sought to regulate most economic activities outside the state sector. Their experiences have been typical of scores of developing countries that followed similar paths of industrialisation. This 1993 study examines the origins of these state sectors, the dynamics of their growth and crises, and the efforts to reform or liquidate them. It is argued that public ownership creates its own culture and pathology that are similar across otherwise different systems. The logic of principal-agent relations under public ownership is so powerful that it swamps culture and peculiar institutional histories. While public sectors accumulate powerful associated interests over time, against most predictions these prove relatively powerless to block the reform process.

"This book is one of the most important books written on the political economy of economic reform in developing, non-Communist countries that I have read." The Annals of the American Academy, "This book is a model of how to do context-sensitive yet truly comparative politics...such a good book that I find it impossible not to ask its author to delve deeper and wider. I learned so much from what he did write that I am eager to learn from what more he could write." Margaret Levi, American Political Science Review, "John Waterbury has written another classic. He fully lives up to his reputation for presenting rich, prodigiously researched descriptions of political economies, theoretically informed by mainstream American political science....Country experts will find this book a treasure trove of information about macroeconomics; government structures; the mazes of public-sector and other business regulations; the size, history, structures, and management of state enterprises; business groups; and labor unions." International Journal of Middle East Studies