In the ear­ly 1990’s, when I start­ed my ca­reer as a busi­ness jour­nal­ist, pri­vati­sa­tion meant the sale of state as­sets and was usu­al­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with the struc­tur­al ad­just­ment pro­grammes ad­vanced by the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

An April 2016 IMF work­ing pa­per, au­thored by Kevin Greenidge, Mered­ith Arnold McIn­tyre, and Han­lei Yun, and ti­tled Struc­tur­al Re­form and Growth: What Re­al­ly Mat­ters? Ev­i­dence from the Caribbean places pri­vati­sa­tion among a gen­er­al pack­age of struc­tur­al re­forms that un­der­pinned the pol­i­cy ad­vice and con­di­tion­al­i­ties of ad­just­ment pro­grammes im­ple­ment­ed by the IMF and the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s.

This re­form pack­age in­clud­ed: