This book sets out to demystify the privatization process - currently transforming the economics of the world - by reviewing both the business organization and capital-raising aspects of the process as experienced in France, Italy, UK, Canada, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico, particularly in the light of the latest important developments in those countries. This work does not claim to be exhaustive.It offers a focus on the status reached up to 1994, as understood by those heavily engaged in the process, with a grasp of the large canvass of considerations and objectives that play upon such transactions. This handbook emerges from the distilled expertise of two committees of the IBA's Section on Business Law, who met and discusses the matter in October 1993 in New Orleans. The sure prediction made is that privatizations will continue to constitute a major form of business transaction and to involve a significant percentage of the world's capital-raising requirements.