This book is concerned with public production of private goods or, with public supply of private demand, and examines the economic issues that arise in this context. It takes a middle road between recent more extensive and more extreme treatments of public enterprises.

Analytic framework - markets and ministers; normative theory - how public enterprises should behave; practice and positive theory - how public enterprises actually behave and why; policy - how to move actual behaviour towards desired behaviour; privatization of public enterprises.