private sector

noun, adj — 2 senses

private sector

nounalso spelled private-sector

Etymology private + sector

1

Business All organizations in an economy or jurisdiction that are not controlled by government, including privately owned businesses and not-for-profit organizations.

  • After spending two decades at various government agencies, he returned to the private sector and took a job as a business consultant.
  • Policing the relationship between government and business in a free society is difficult. Businesspeople have every right to lobby governments, and civil servants to take jobs in the private sector.2013 August 10, Schumpeter, “Cronies and capitols”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8848:
1 more example
  • After decades of observation, it's pretty obvious to me that all governments are uniformly useless at actually running anything, so we need to employ the private sector to do the job for us on properly specified contracts [...].2022 August 24, Nigel Harris, “Comment: Rail strikes deadlock”, in RAIL, number 964, page 3:
Antonyms
public sector
Related terms
public sector

private-sector

adj

Etymology private + sector

1

Of or pertaining to the private sector.

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — authors: page histories for private sector and private-sector.