Does the government have an unfair advantage when it competes with businesses providing the same goods and services? In Competing with the Government (Hoover Institution Press, 2004), edited by Hoover research fellow R. Richard Geddes, leading economists discuss the unfair advantages of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and how they are harmful:
- Government firms are often endowed with government-granted privileges and immunities not enjoyed by private rivals.
- Those privileges give government firms an artificial competitive advantage over private rivals.
- Government firms may use their special benefits in anticompetitive ways.
Chapters 1 and 2 together demonstrate that SOEs have the incentive, the opportunity, and the capacity to inefficiently compete with private firms. The remaining chapters illustrate that they will, in fact, engage in anticompetitive behavior. In chapter 3, anticompetitive behavior by government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, is examined. In the final chapter, the anticompetitive behavior in postal services in the United States and abroad is reviewed.
R. Richard Geddes is a Hoover research fellow, an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University, and an adjunct scholar of the American Enterprise Institute. He was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in 1999–2000 and a visiting faculty fellow at Yale Law School in 1995–1996.
Contributors: R. Richard Geddes; David E. M. Sappington, who holds the Lanzillotti-McKethan Eminent Scholar Chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Florida; J. Gregory Sidak, who is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics Emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute and president and chief executive office of Criterion Economics, L.L.C., an economic consulting firm based in Washington, D.C.; and Peter J. Wallison, who is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and codirector of AEI's program on Financial Market Deregulation.
