Why State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) underperform? Case of Pakistan Railways-1

In every country, developed or developing, general public has been complaining against the state owned enterprises about their performance. Ranging from inefficiency, poor service delivery, non-friendly customer behaviour of the employees, inadequate complaint redressal mechanism to corruption and bad governance are some of the common allegations leveled against these enterprises.

In this series of articles we will be discussing the case of Pakistan Railways -nature of the complaints against its performance, their underlying causes, structural, managerial or otherwise and suggest a way to improve its efficiency and service delivery. The lessons learnt, conclusions drawn and suggested way forward could be,more or less easily applied to other sate owned enterprises.

(Kindly read the full article at the following URLs)

http://www.shahidhussainraja.com/case-of-pakistan-railways-1

http://www.shahidhussainraja.com/case-of-pakistan-railways-2

Privatisation in Pakistan

                                                                                                                Pakistan is soon starting what may be called her fourth generation of privatisation. The first round, which  started in 1950s and peaked in 1960s, was meant to strengthen a nascent private sector which was  reluctant to invest in industry  either due to paucity of requisite resources at its disposal or  high risks involved or both. Consequently the state built factories in strategic and other important sectors and handed them over, at very nominal rates, to the businessmen which laid the foundations of Pakistan’s industrial sector. The second generation privatisation, carried out in 1980s was mainly the de-nationalisation of industries nationalised during the 1970s.However 1990s and to some extent early 2000s were the heydays of privatisation when large number of  state owned enterprises were sold to private sector to improve the efficiency and service delivery of the SOEs, by bringing in the incentive and reward mechanism of the private sector who would inject capital, technology and better management practices to  reap efficiency gains more than reducing state losses.
(Kindly read the full article at the following URLs)


http://www.shahidhussainraja.com/privatisation-in-pakistan-1

http://www.shahidhussainraja.com/privatization-in-pakistan-2