For countries with many more state-owned enterprises (SOEs) than the United States, the term privatization means the transfer from public/government control or state-ownership to private enterprise usually through the outright sale of shares or interest.[xii] In North America, we use the term privatization more liberally to define anything from the divestiture of government property to the issuance of franchises to deregulation and, finally, to the contractual relationship of the public-private partnership.
True privatization projects are rare in the United States since the government has never really owned that many enterprises (such as electric utilities) that could be privatized either at the national or local levels. While the term privatization can be (and is) applied liberally to most any type of project in which the public sector engages the private, this paper proposes that the unique characteristic of a public-private partnership is the "partnership". While privatization implies and emphasizes a change in ownership, PPPs focus more properly on the entire process and what each partner brings to the project.