Prof. Dr. Marcus Sidki, Professor of Economics and Statistics at the Ludwigshafen University of Applied Sciences, has been appointed Fellow at the Liberal Institute of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom in Berlin for a period of 12 months as of September 01, 2020. 

The Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom offers political education in Germany and around the world based on the idea of liberalism. The Liberal Institute is the foundation's think tank. It takes a stand on issues of the day, formulates substantive positions that thoughtfully develop the political model of liberalism, and puts them up for public discussion.

As part of the fellowship, Prof. Dr. Sidki will be actively involved in the Liberales Institut's networking activities  with actors from politics, associations and business in the Berlin political arena, and will conduct accompanying event formats as part of the foundation's political education activities. The goal is to write a study on the topic of public companies. These are companies that are majority-owned by the public sector but are not directly assigned to it. In Germany, there are approximately 18,000 such companies with about 2.1 million employees. They are active in a variety of areas, e.g. in energy and heat supply, as housing associations or hospitals, or in waste disposal. They mostly provide services of general interest and are generally in competition with companies from the private sector.

The study that Prof. Sidki is working on as part of the fellowship is intended to provide an in-depth analysis of the position that public companies occupy in a social market economy and where there are possible exaggerations of state intervention and distortions of competition. Based on national and international scientific findings on the discussion about the pros and cons of such activities of the public sector and taking into account regulatory aspects, the study should result in policy-shaping suggestions in the sense of the foundation's mission.