Article Text
Letter
PostScript
Understanding privatisation’s impacts on health: lessons from the soviet experience
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If privatisation ever had a significant impact on health, it would show up in the former Soviet Union. Compare Margaret Thatcher the “Great Privatiser”, who privatized roughly 30 state-owned companies during her 11-year tenure, to Boris Yeltsin’s regime, which under the guidance of Jeffrey Sachs and World Bank economists,1–3 privatised over 15 000 large state-owned companies in less than 2 years. Such an episode of privatisation as that seen in Russia during the early- to mid-90s remains unparalleled in both its scale and its scope.4
Not all former Soviet countries took such a radical approach to privatisation. Many opted for a more gradual …
Footnotes
Competing interests: none declared.