Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1959, from privatize + -ation.
Wiktionary
n. The transfer of a company or organization from government to private ownership and control.
Wikipedia
Privatization, also spelled privatisation (in British English), may have several meanings. Primarily, it is the process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency, public service, or public property from the public sector (a government) to the private sector, either to a business that operates for a profit or to a nonprofit organization. It may also mean the government outsourcing of services or functions to private firms, e.g. revenue collection, law enforcement, and prison management.
Privatization has also been used to describe two unrelated transactions. The first is the buying of all outstanding shares of a publicly traded company by a single entity, making the company privately owned. This is often described as private equity. The second is a demutualization of a mutual organization or cooperative to form a joint-stock company.
Usage examples of "privatization".
The peg causes suffering only when combined with the Four Horsemen of IMF neoliberal policy: liberalized financial markets, free trade, mass privatization and government surpluses.
The French strikes called above all for a new notion of the public, a new construction of public space against the neoliberal mechanisms of privatization that accompany more or less everywhere the project of capitalist globalization.
The current neoliberal trend toward the privatization of energy and communication services is another turn of the spiral.
This privatization was an ongoing thing throughout the Republic, and was usually effected through the censors, praetors, aediles and quaestors.
That will overcome a serious defect in the privatization process that the US demands as a condition for calling off its economic warfare: under the evil influence of the Sandinistas, the process allowed the wrong class of people -- workers in the enterprise -- to gain a share in ownership.
You know the list by now: fire-sale privatizations, flexible labor markets (i.
Privatization and the need for production weigh more heavily on religious Moslems than on secular ones, or on Copts.
The World Bank’s former chief economist, Joe Stiglitz, who once promoted the privatizations for the Bank, told me how their teams would fly into Russia and Asia, preach the wonders of selling electricity markets, “and you could see the wheels turning in the local officials’ minds”.