The Public Wealth of Nations
The Public Wealth of Nations: How Management of Public Assets Can Boost or Bust Economic Growth is a non-fiction book, co-authored by Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster, stating that governments have trillions of dollars in commercial assets, from companies and forests to real estate, but they are often poorly managed.
The book says that things could be improved by ring-fencing assets from political meddling in independent National Wealth Funds —holding companies whose professional managers are free to sweat them as if they were privately owned. The focus, they argue, should be on yield, not ownership.
The book was included in The Economist—Books of the Year 2015 and the Financial Times, FT’s Best Books of the Year 2015. The authors argue that better management of public assets would increase global living standards and improve the fabric of democratic institutions across the world, and that such management could raise USD2.7trn annually for governments.
