Reappraising State-Owned Enterprise

10

Iron and Steel State Industry in the UK and Italy

Ruggero Ranieri

In Italy, during the 1930s, a large part of the steel industry was incorporated in IRI-Finsider, a publicly owned conglomerate. After roughly 60 years, between 1993 and 1996, all steel state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Italy were privatized (Balconi 1991, 1998). In Britain, after 1945, the industry became the object of party political controversy. Two successive nationalizations were carried out by Labour governments: the first one, short lived, in 1951, and the second, more enduring, in 1967. Each of these was followed by a return to the private sector (Vaizey 1974; Beauman 2000).

The nature of the public sector was quite different in the two countries. There are, however, ...