Privatisation and new tasks for private law

During the last decades of the twentieth century the state governments of most European countries have been the targets of reorganisational measures which have affected the relationship between the state and the market. Various methods of privatisation or marketisation have been used. Privatisation measures in the narrow sense have limited the extent of state ownership. In addition, public service functions have been contracted out to private bodies, or have been reduced, leaving the market to provide the service. Economic result-orientation and other market-oriented mechanisms have been introduced in the public sector. Once regulated branches of industry and commerce, as well as international trade and financial markets, have been deregulated.

Tracing the pressures related to such measures from the legal point of view, one should not conclude that they simply imply demands for deregulation of an excessive public sector and therefore mainly affect the field of public law. Various consequences for private law can also be envisaged. Some are rather self-evident: the shrinking of the tasks performed by public bodies and the market-orientation seem logically to imply an increase in the relative importance of private law within the legal order. More interesting than this assessment, however, are the possible consequences as to the content of private law. My essay will focus on some of these consequences.

It is interesting to note, as a starting point, that one may assume that contradictory pressures on private law will follow from the privatisation/marketisation tendency.