The study examines competition between privately and publicly owned booking centres in the Swedish taxi market by studying technical efficiency, and breaking down technical efficiency into managerial and organisational efficiency. The main results are that a large amount of technical efficiency exists and that no direct relationship between technical efficiency and type of ownership can be found.

British ports provide a “laboratory” of mixed ownership enterprises. This paper applies stochastic frontier models to test the relative efficiency of public compared with private enterprises. The finding is supportive of the view that efficiency gains from privatisation may be limited if the change involves the transfer of ownership from the public to the private sector only.

The productive efficiency of the railway systems in 19 OECD countries is analysed. The empirical results show that: (i) railway systems with high dependence on public subsidies are significantly less efficient than similar railways with less dependence on subsidies; (ii) railways with a high degree of managerial autonomy from regulatory authorities tend to achieve higher efficiency.