State Enterprise: Business or Politics?

State Enterprise (1971) examines nationalized industries and their political control. It looks at their objectives, and the guidance given to the politicians tasked with running these industries, as well as the qualifications needed, and the performance demanded of them. Many of the contributions to the debate about government–board relations in the nationalized industries were made by economists, but the author concludes, through a thorough analysis of the attempt to apply new methods of economic decision-making, that the results of this debate have not done much to settle the basic problems of running nationalized industries.