CEO Forums

Guests at recent CEO Forums  

Held at lunchtime or after five in Wellington, members and other CEOs are invited to hear business leaders, government ministers and public policy leaders speak on topical issues.

Our most recent CEO Forum was with Professor Bill Megginson, 8 August 2011.

Global Trends in Privatisation: Lessons for Maximising Economic Gains

Whether it’s through MOMs (mixed ownership models), PPPs or straight-out privatisations, reducing the government’s stake in businesses is firmly back on the political agenda. If a National-led government is elected later this year, private investors are likely to be offered a stake in Meridian, Genesis, Mighty River Power, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand. What are the models and processes most likely to maximise economic gains? And what can New Zealand learn from the global trends in privatisation that saw US$213 billion of government assets move into private hands in 2010?

Bill Megginson is a leading international academic authority and researcher on privatisation of state-owned enterprises, in particular those executed through public share offerings. He is Professor and Rainbolt Chair in Finance at the University of Oklahoma’s Michael F. Price College of Business, and is Executive Director of the Privatisation Barometer. In 2010 he received the University of Oklahoma’s top research prize. He is author and co-author of nine text books and his studies and research articles have been published in many top academic journals, including the Journal of Economic Literature, the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and Foreign Policy. His research articles have been downloaded over 37,000 times from the Social Sciences Research Network, and his co-authored privatisation survey article, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2001, is the eighth most widely cited finance article published since 2000.

Dr Megginson has served as a privatisation consultant for the New York Stock Exchange, the OECD, the IMF, the World Federation of Exchanges, and the World Bank. Prior to entering academia in 1986, he worked as a petroleum chemist at the world’s largest styrene monomer plant and at the largest independent petroleum refinery in the United States.