The assumption behind privatisation in eastern Europe and elsewhere is that private ownership improves corporate performance. We focus on comparing the performance of state firms with either private or privatised firms operating under reasonably similar conditions in three countries of eastern Europe. We supplement this comparison by an examination of the relative performance of privatised and state firms in the period before the former were privatised. Our empirical results confirm the hypothesis that the effect of ownership change is particularly pronounced on the revenue side of corporate performance. In general, we find that firms with outsider owners significantly outperform the firms with insider owners on most performance measures, and that the employees are particularly ineffective owners (indeed less effective than the state). Subscribe to publications email alerts.
September 1997 Data on mid-sized firms in three transition economies provide strong evidence that private ownership- for worker ownership- improves corporate performance. And the privatized firms' superior ability to generate revenues allows those firms to sustain or expand employment. Using a large sample of data on mid-sized firms in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland, Frydman, Gray, Hessel, and Rapacynski compare the performance of privatized and state firms in the environment of the postcommunist transition. They find strong evidence that private ownership- for worker ownership- improves corporate performance. They find no evidence of the privatization shock that was supposed to afflict the behavior of firms undergoing rapid changes in ownership. Instead, they observe a severe shock from marketization, affecting both state and privatized firms- a shock for which private ownership provides a powerful antidote. Among their other findings: Private ownership is most effective in improving a firm's ability to generate revenues, an area in which entrepreneurship seems to be required. Ownership also affects a firm's ability to remove the rather obvious cost inefficiencies inherited from the past, but this effect is less pronounced, as both state and privatized firms engage in significant cost restructuring. Most important, privatized firms generate significantly more employment gains than state firms. It is their superior ability to generate revenues, rather than competence at cost-cutting, that allows them to sustain or expand employment. This is why privatization is the dominant strategy for expanding employment in transition. Outsider-owned firms perform better than insider-owned firms on most performance measures, but there is enough difference between employee- and manager-owned firms to suggest that putting all insiders under a common umbrella is unjustified. Although the effects of managerial ownership are ambiguous, putting employees in control appears to offer no advantages over state ownership on any measure and creates a distinct disadvantage in terms of employment performance. Among outsider owners, privatization funds seem to do as well at revitalizing the privatized companies as do other outsider owners; in particular, the authors find no evidence that funds are less effective than strategic investors. And foreign investors provide perhaps less of an edge than might have been expected; their impact appears no stronger than that of major domestic outsiders. This paper- product of the Development Research Group- part of a larger effort in the Bank to explore issues of corporate governance in transition economies. The study was funded by the Bank's Research Support Budget under research project Corporate Governance in Central Europe (RPO 678-42).
IFC Discussion Paper No. 38.QUOTEIt is now universally acknowledged that ownership matters; that private ownership in and of itself is a major determinant of good performance in firms... Decent economic policy and well-functioning legal and administrative institutions... matter greatly as well.QUOTEThis paper looks at what happens when the shift to private ownership gets far out in front of the effort to build the institutional underpinnings of a capitalist economy. The emphasis is on what went wrong and why and what, if anything, can be done to be correct it. Proposals include renationalization and/or postponement of further privatization, both to be accompanied by measures to strengthen the managerial capacities of the state. Neither approach seems likely to produce short-term improvements. The regrettable fact is that governments that botch privatization are equally likely to botch the management of state-owned firms. In a number of Central European transition countries, privatization is living up to expectations; and there is no need for such measures. For institutionally-weak countries, the less dramatic but reasonable short-term course of action is to push ahead more slowly with case- by-case and tender privatization in cooperation with the international assistance community in hopes of producing some success stories that will lead by example.
This book covers a wide variety of aspects of transition in Central and Southeast Europe and the CIS, including the socialist legacy, privatization and growth, skills, and banking reforms. It also covers the evolution of the global economy beyond transition, looking at complexity, risk management, the optimal transition path, and globalization.
