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Global Auction of Public Assets

Date: February 16, 2010

Time: 12:00 PM

220 Fifth Avenue, 5th Floor
New York NY 10001

Public infrastructure has a vital role in economic development, increases productivity, generates employment, and improves community well-being. The 21st century has introduced new and complex challenges for the development and maintenance of public structures, including adapting to climate change, and meeting the economic, energy, water, transportation, and social needs of global megacities. These challenges are further complicated by an infrastructure market financed by public-private partnerships.

Join us for a Demos Forum with Dexter Whitfield, author of Global Auction of Public Assets: Public Sector Alternatives to the Infrastructure Market and Public Private Partnerships. In this new book, Whitfield argues that public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the global infrastructure market, financed by investment and pension funds, are fuelling a new era of public asset sales. A secondary market has emerged in which schools, hospitals and roads are traded like commodities. Whitfield asserts that most PPP projects have little or no democratic control or transparency, are costly, of poor value, lack innovation and flexibility, reduce employment, and exaggerate risk transfer. Global Auction of Public Assets demonstrates why new investment priorities are needed, and sets out ways to build alliances and strategic interventions that can improve the global development of public structures.

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Dexter Whitfield is Director of the European Services Strategy Unit and Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide's Australian Institute for Social Research. He has undertaken extensive research and policy analysis of regional/city economies and public sector provision, jobs and employment strategies, impact assessment and evaluation, marketization and privatization, modernization, and public management.

Whitfield has also undertaken commissioned work for a wide range of public sector organizations, local authorities and agencies, and has worked extensively with trade unions in the UK at regional, national, and international levels. He is the author of five books, has published numerous articles and papers, and has advised public bodies and trade unions in Europe, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

This event will be webcast live at www.demos.org.

To RSVP, click here, or contact Jinny Khanduja at jkhanduja@demos.org or 212.389.1399.

With: Michael Lipsky

Tags: Role of Government and the Public Sector | Revitalizing Government | Global Engagement | Role of Government in the Economy | Sustainable Development