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Abstract(s)
The use of market mechanisms has been progressively introduced as an alternative solution to deliver public services since the 1980s. The expectation was that competitive bidding and trading could maximize consumer choice in the market as well as lower costs of service provision. Over the years, the literature has explored privatization decisions in several service areas, including solid waste, health care, and fire protection, among many others. Our work addresses an uncommon public service function, Portugal’s civil law notaries, and seeks to analyze the factors that led to the formation of diverse market structures as a result of the choice of the privatization path over civil service status by public notaries. The Portuguese government allowed public notaries the choice to go private and regulated a numerus clausus of notaries by district coinciding with local government boundaries. The same government also increased competitive pressures on notaries by authorizing qualified lawyers admitted to the bar to perform some of the same services. Finally, more recently, government reorganized the mission statement of a specific set of public agencies in order to render them able to compete in notary services.
Taking into account the nature of the services to be provided and the belief that the numerus clausus system would create private quasi-monopolies, notaries were expected to choose the privatization option. Yet, after the reform is completed, a diversity of market structures prevails throughout the 278 notarial districts.
Our main hypothesis is that competitive markets formed in jurisdictions having a larger and more profitable number of notary and legal acts that provided financial survival and profit. In contrast, monopolies formed as a result of a perceived absence of market opportunities and demand.
During the period 2010-2011 we collected data from official statistics of the notary system supplemented by data on the economic and demographic features of each market jurisdiction. Multinomial logistic regression is used to test the key hypothesis regarding market arrangements in the 278 notarial districts of Continental Portugal.
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Keywords
Notaries Privatization
Citation
Tavares, António F.; Rodrigues, Miguel (2011). Privatization, regulation and market structures: an empirical analysis of the reform of the Portuguese notary system. In Public Management Research Conference. Syracuse, New York