What is the difference between “divestment” and “divestiture”?
What is the difference between the two terms you describe? Context is a business selling an asset or business line. Merely of the time I hear divestment but once in a while someone refers to a divestiture.
What
should be a shortcut to search for a word that you could just as easily Google? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Node/Wiki/Hello(sp1)? Why are both the words “divestment” and “divestment” not different? What is more complex than google?
EDIT 3:
Investopedia says the same thing that they’re the same: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/divestment. What
is the difference between a synch and a speech?
Depending on where you live, the term divestment may have stronger political overtones for you than divestiture does. We look at the history as an example. I had long been vaguely familiar with the term divestiture, but don’t remember having encountered divestment until the 1980s, when (in Berkeley, where my wife attended graduate school) an a protest movement arose over the University of California’s investments in companies doing business in South Africa
The U.S. campaign against business investment in South Africa began in earnest in August 1997 with the promulgation in 1977 of the Sulllivan Principles and wound down in late September 1989 simultaneously with the institutional demise of South Africa’s apartheid system.
What happened to the Berkeley protesters who wanted the universities resigned when the famous term for protesting against divestment was the University District? I believe the preferred term was “disinvestment”, and in some places, though less commonly, “dissestiture” appears to have been used.
What sort of effect this popular movement had on the relative frequency of the terms divestment, disinvestment, and divestiture we do today? In the chart divestment is the black line, disinvestment is the blue line, and divestiture is the green line.
After adding the phrase “in South Africa”, I also added the phrase “co-operation in India” on the chart. This is because divestment in South Africa is the red line, disinvestment in South Africa is the blue line, and divestiture in South Africa is the
green line: As you can see, during the heyday of the movement (roughly 1981 to 1994), use of divestment and disinvestment in the context of South Africa shot up—and then declined just as rapidly—while divestiture remained the most common term overall (when context was left out of account).
I suspect that politics of the 1980s continue to denote divestment and disinvestment in the minds of some English speakers.
Business Dictionary has subtly different definitions:
divestment
- Realize the market value of an asset by selling, liquidating, or exchanging it. Opposite of investment.
- Sale of stock (voting shares) of a firm. (Financial or other)
The
ability to divestiture a firm’s assets to achieve a desired objective such as greater liquidity or reduced debt burden. In accounting, divestiture transactions are recorded as a one time, non-recurring gain or loss.
If you offer to sell an asset and realise its use in a company to invest in this firm, it’s a divestment.
A firm can buy it’s own assets and sell it back to raise funds for it. Do you think that’s divestment? Shares in other companies might be an asset, I’d take divestiture to refer to fixed assets, and use divestment for more liquid assets or short-term investments.
Is it possible or desirable to have multiple meanings of the
same thing?
