They privatize the registry services (driving, business, birth certificates) in Alberta, Canada.
It went from a US DMV experience - shitty attitudes, bankers hours, two locations in the city
To…
Dozens of small businesses around the city, hours that cater to people that work, lower prices (they all competed with each other) and good attitudes (because you could always go somewhere else).
A massive jump in quality of services that took it from time wasting drudgery to a simple, easy process that was cheaper.
An additional one that comes to mind is following the privatization of airlines in many countries, air travel got much cheaper. India is also a glaring example, there are instances in Europe as well. (The US was never a monopoly but it was highly regulated up until the Carter admin in the 1970s. Deregulation produced a similar positive result)
Going further back there are numerous academic examples. The classic figure is that private farms in the soviet union worked only 3% of the total sown land, but produced 66% of the eggs, 64% of the potatoes, 40% of the meat, and 39% of the milk. China had similar figures.
In general I think privatization works best where that force of competition can influence things. I'm not sure exactly how Chicago parking meters companies could compete with each other or improve 'service', but for industries prone to competition, privatization makes a lot of sense to me over government monopoly.
This is the problem, your example is too new. Give it a decade or two for amalgamation to occur and let's see where things are once 2-3 companies own the market.
Telecoms used to be a natural monopoly when it was based on land lines to every house. It made no sense to lay competing infrastructure for that. Now with mobile networks the infrastructure is a fraction of the cost and competing networks can coexist seamlessly, so a competitive marketplace for services makes sense.
Waiting years to get a phone line was the norm for most people I knew there. I've known several folks where the wait list for getting a land line was over a decade - and we're not talking some remote rural village. If we project how long it would take to get the country connected at the pace they were going vs the progress private companies made with cell phones, it is several orders of magnitude. The number of people in the former category who would have died before having a chance at merely having a phone is in the millions.
It comes down to who can get away with what: do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.
As opposed to simply not having the service for all those decades, and continuing to not have it?
Keep in mind that these governments have a longer history of not delivering, and not maintaining existing infrastructure than most of these private companies. By a margin of decades. There is more data on their inability to deliver than there is on the private companies' malfeasance.
> do you have more leverage on your officials or on your local conpanies? If your local companies are monopolies that benefit more from not serving you, you'll be in the same situation as you descibre.
The difference being local monopolies still provide service to those with resources to pay, whereas the local governments wouldn't.
If there is a market, they will continue to provide service. If they leave, another company will take its place.
I'm not a believer in the free market. But this is one of the classic examples where in corrupt countries international private companies really were way, way better. When the lowly street vendor can afford a cell phone, everyone's life is way better.
As it’s mining, I was kind of expecting the gov to just have laundered the env impacts to a private company, but it seems it actually has positive developments at this point: https://share.america.gov/peruvian-copper-mine-also-produces...
Kudos.
> Telecom in India
I don’t know much about India, from a quick it looked to me like they refused to privatize the low level (cable lying) infra for a long time, and are now in the process of looking into it: https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/telecom-...
I must be missing something
> airlines
There was competition happening before the privatization though ? I only followed the european ones, but the quality of service and reliability mostly went down after the privatizations. The more interesting part to me is how much this industry resisted unleaded gas because of the costs associated. Could gov regulation be an answer to force a better direction when it makes no economic sense ?
> competition
100% agree on not keeping blocking competition for non critical, lifeline services. I think gov managed infra is inherently prone to bloat and corruption, but that’s a price we pay to keep that infra working (postal service costing 20% more is better to me than 20% of the country losing access to postal service). That calculus doesn’t make sense when it comes to fields were other players are thriving and/or lower service quality isn’t life or death issues.
Australia Post is wholly owned by the Australian Government represented by two Shareholder Ministers, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Communications, Urban Infrastructure, Cities and the Arts.[1]
[1] https://www.finance.gov.au/government/government-business-en...
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an example where “efficiency” wasn’t just giving up on social obligations (either by screwing employees, or screwing customers, often both).
I’m looking around and see postal services (it still breaks me that “going postal” means what it means), roads, railways, energy production. I don’t see any of them having gotten meaningfully cheaper or providing better service or handling their employees better through privatization.
As an hybrid, splitting into nationalized infra management and privatized customer facing service potentially worked for ISPs. That’s the only mildly positive example I can come up with.