Systematic Review and Text Mining of Perceptions of Public Sector Reforms in Peer-reviewed Scientific Literature

Problem: A new wave of public sector reforms named “reverse privatization” is diffusing from the Global North owing to widespread discontent and negative perceptions following the privatization of utilities. The aggregate perceptions of Global South stakeholders after water and energy utility privatization was the empirical interest of this study. Objective: To synthesize existing evidence to answer two important questions about the perceptions of citizens and managers after water and energy privatization reforms in Global South countries. Novelty: There are diverse research on public sector reforms but a lack of studies that synthesize existing evidence to inform policymaking or spur further research. This research was a first attempt to combine evidence on the perceptions of Global South citizens and managers about public service delivery after the privatization of water and energy SOEs (State-Owned Enterprises). Methods: The study employed a mixed-methods systematic review that followed a modified version of the PRISMA checklist. It also applied text mining to gain insights into the selected literature. Scopus and Web of Science were the databases searched. CADIMA was used to manage the systematic review, VOSviewer for term co-occurrence analysis, Orange-3 for sentiment analysis, and MS Excel 2016 for descriptive statistical analyses and text corpus management. Hypotheses: The study tested two hypotheses which were formulated from the main research questions and the traditional literature review. Results: Only 11 eligible articles from 839 unique potential literature made the final selection used for evidence syntheses and text analytics. In common, Global South citizens shared negative perceptions following water and energy SOEs privatization; while managers opined that stakeholders’ inclusion, government transparency, and competitive tendering in the privatization process were the most significant factors affecting the prospect of utility privatization to create public value. Keywords: post-privatization perceptions; public sector reforms; State-Owned Enterprises; water-energy utilities; Global South; systematic review; text mining.