Government operations

Government operations at all levels in all areas. Covered below is every penny, and every operation and process, from the annual financial statements and operational reports of the governments of the world. Fasten your seatbelts for a ride into the unorganized world of governments. The disorder and ineffectiveness is worse than you could ever have imagine. If you thought your home was in disarray when you couldn’t find that thing you were looking for, that was nothing compared to the world of governments, there nothing works, and they don't clean out the garage for weeks.

Prevent waste

Today, one goal of a government owned corporation is usually to attempt to avoid the perceived worst excesses of centralised governmental planning and control (compare nationalisation, command economy) by placing such an entity at "arm's length" and adopting/adapting some of the perceived efficiencies/democratisation of corporate structure and governance such as separate Boards of Directors with independent (external) members.

Some governments let external analysts review the operations and financials just like Wall Street analysts review public companies. An import element of that review is to hold regular, perhaps quarterly, public conference calls between management and analysts. Which are recorded for anyone to hear. This is however so far (2004) a rare occurance.

Government-owned corporations

Services

Government subsidiaries may produce services like:

Education (ex community college)
Emergency services
Entertainment (ex Canadian Broadcasting Corporation)
Entitlements
Financial services
Financing
Fire fighting
Healthcare
Insurance
Law
Law enforcement
Police
Postal service
Transportation (ex government transportation)

Goods

Government subsidiaries may produce goods like:

Local government

At the level of local government, territorial or other authorities may set up government corporations such as "Local Authority Trading Enterprises" (LATEs).

Commonwealth of Nations

In monarchical commonwealth countries country-wide government corporations often use the style "crown corporation". Notable exceptions include both the state-owned enterprises and the crown entities in New Zealand. Examples of crown corporations include the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in Canada and Air Canada before it underwent privatisation. Cabinet ministers (ministers of the crown) often control the shares in such public corporations.

United States

In the United States, businesses that are government owned include Amtrak and the United States Postal Service. Many states have government owned businesses for operations as well. Generally speaking, a statute passed by a legislature specifically sets up a government owned company in order to undertake a specific public purpose with public funds or public property.

Privatization

Main article: privatization

In Japan, Japan Post is partially owned by the government, but is about to get sold to the public during the following years (following 2004). Japan Railway (JR), NTT and Japan Tobacco was formally owned by the government.