But certainly a major challenge in the state-owned sector is to achieve innovation.
State Enterprises Minister Laksamana Sukardi, in charge of reforming the state-owned sector, is a former banker who joined Vice President Megawati Sukarnoputri's Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) in the early 1990s, when it was hardly politically expedient to do so.
Slovenia's mostly state-owned banking sector is suffering from mounting bad debts and the government has struggled to borrow money.
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But the vulnerability of critical infrastructure systems, mostly owned by the private sector, has slowly emerged as a real threat to national security.
Chavez nationalizes steel sector partly owned by Argentina (TECHINT).
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The statutory inquiry was set up by the Northern Ireland Executive to investigate institutions run by the state and church and also those owned by the private sector or voluntary bodies from 1922 to 1995.
There is now a big gap between the two definitions of net debt, largely because the ONS took the decision to include all of the balance sheets of the banks that are majority owned by the public sector.
In fact, the interest rate - or yield - on Portuguese sovereign debt has risen relentlessly, especially in the last week, as the deal to cut the value of Greek debt owned by the private sector has moved closer to a reality.
At the time of Independence, about 60% of India's power sector was privately owned.
It needs to create new jobs for the millions employed in state-owned enterprises and the farming sector whose jobs will become redundant after China joins the World Trade Organization.
Ninety-eight percent of it is owned and operated by the private sector.
State-owned banks still dominate the financial sector and are kept profitable by a positive spread between loan and deposit rates dictated by government policy.
Average private earnings rose by just 0.2% in the year to December (in the public sector, excluding state-owned banks, pay went up by 2.4%).
Indeed, the Vice President, John Mahama, has been complaining persistently about "excessive bureaucracy and red-tapeism in the public sector" in the state-owned Daily Graphic.
One reason is that, on the Continent at least, many government-owned properties are for sale to the private sector, which gives real estate companies some bargain buys that generate good rental income.
Moscow's flexing of its muscles in the energy sector - which saw state-owned firm Gazprom temporarily cut off gas supplies to neighbouring Ukraine - as well as new rules for the foreign ownership of Russian companies and export tax rises, all have implications for BP.
There are 31 state-owned Global 2000 firms versus 25 from the private sector.
About a fifth of Britain's private-sector employees work for heavily indebted companies owned by private-equity firms, notes Christopher Hall, a lawyer who sits on the EHYA's insolvency-reform committee.
The importance of such human investment is also dawning on an unlikely business sector: China's threadbare state-owned enterprises.
The existence of widespread shadow banking serving the private sector, however, indicates that state-owned enterprises have much easier access to credit.
From his base in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep, Adnan Altunkaya says his family-owned company commands two-thirds of the Iraqi nappy sector.
As recently as the 1980s, most French banks were owned by the state, and by the 1990s the sector was bordering on bankruptcy.
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The decision has cautioned consternation in Brazil and Argentina, whose energy firms - such as state-owned Petrobras - have major stakes in the Bolivian gas sector.
The Russian energy sector remains, however, substantially state-owned.
In the UK, the mutual sector includes organisations ranging from housing associations to employee-owned businesses.
More investigation is warranted, but the improving profitability of privately owned builders would seem to be additional good news for the beleaguered sector.
Higher borrowing costs deter private-sector companies, but do not discourage inefficient state-owned enterprises, because they are less bothered about their return on capital.
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The story is similar with its top bond fund, the Virtus Multi-Sector Short Term Bond Fund, run by Virtus-owned money manager Newfleet Asset Management.
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Some lawmakers are calling for an inquiry into the oil sector, in particular the running of the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, widely perceived as the home of some of Nigeria's most explosive scandals - and the source of gigantic sums of money.
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