The Impact of Privatization in Transition
Economies
by
Saul Estrin, London School of Economics and Political Science Article for the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd Edition
Introduction
Privatization is the process whereby the ownership of the state’s productive assets, often utilities or large industrial enterprises, are transferred into private hands. This has been a major activity for governments in both the developed and developing world since Mrs Thatcher’s first modern
privatization programme in the UK between 1979 and 1984.. The cumulative revenues raised from the process globally probably exceeds $1.25 trillion dollars, while the role of state owned enterprises in the economies of high income countries has declined from around 8.5% GDP on average in 1984 to around 6% in 1991 and probably below 5% today (see Megginson, 2005). The reduction in state ownership has probably been even more dramatic in less developed countries, falling from around 16% GDP in 1981 to around 5% in 2004. Privatization is intended to improve corporate efficiency and generate revenues for the state, and there is now probably sufficient experience in different economic and institutional environments to evaluate its impact relative to expectations.
Privatization has been a particularly important phenomenon in the transition process in Central and Eastern Europe from planning to a market system. This is because communist regimes had placed almost all the productive assets of the economy into state hands for ideological reasons, and to facilitate the planning process. As a result, countries like Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union contained virtually no private sector at all – typically in excess of 90% of assets were state owned – and even in countries with slightly larger private sectors, like Poland or Hungary, private ownership was concentrated in agricultural and handicraft activities; industrial firms were all in state hands. This meant that privatization was a central aspect of building a market economy in all the transition economies. Indeed, to quote Dusan Triska in 1992 “privatization is not just one of the many items on the economic program. It is the transformation itself.” (see Estrin, 2002)
This article addresses the privatization process in Central and Eastern Europe, focusing on the objectives, the methods and most importantly the impact of the ownership changes. Privatization
always had some ideological content in he transition economies, especially in the early years, when the reformers wished to create a “capitalist class” supporting the radical changes that were required to build a market economy. But the fundamental objective of privatization in transition economies, as in developed and developing ones, has been to enhance company performance. We will explore whether privatization has succeeded in this objective in the remainder of this article.
Why Privatize?
We begin by identifying why reformers in the transition economies placed such emphasis on privatization. Transforming state owned assets into private hands can improve corporate efficiency (see Vickers and Yarrow, 1985), and, particularly with the privatization of infrastructure, the benefits can spill over to the rest of the economy. To understand why, one must compare company objectives and corporate governance under state and private ownership. It is normally argued that the
fundamental difference between state owned and private firms rests in their objectives: the latter focus exclusively on profit, which generates close attention to costs and to the demands of customers. State owned firms may be interested in profits too, but they will almost certainly be expected by their owner to satisfy other objectives as well, for example being required to meet politically determined targets such as creating or maintaining employment in economically depressed regions or holding prices below average costs for redistributive reasons. In this situation, profits become a secondary criterion, or indeed an irrelevance, and business decisions becomes politicised. Inefficiencies can thrive
because they are not a central concern of the owner, and managers can exploit the lack of clarity in company objectives to ensure an easy life for themselves and employees (see Shleifer and Vishny, 1994).
Therefore an important motive for privatization is to focus attention to profits as the sole objective for the enterprise sector. But the problems of state ownership are more than just diffuse and non-commercial objectives. In a socialist economy, the system of administered prices also means that
market economy, when a public sector firm operates in a competitive market and the government tries to enforce an objective of profit maximisation on its management, weaknesses in corporate
governance can still cause inferior performance to what might be achieved under private ownership. The problem is centred on the asymmetry of information held by managers and owners; outside owners – private or state – can never have full access to the information about corporate performance that is in the hands of managers. Thus, it is hard for them to establish whether poor results are a consequence of unforeseen circumstances or managers exploiting firm profits for their own purposes. Whenever ownership and control are separated, firm-specific rents can be used to satisfy manager’s aim – e.g. lower effort or managerial power, via the size of the firm - rather than profits. However, relative to state ownership, a private ownership system places more effective limits on their discretionary behaviour, via external constraints from product and capital markets which largely operate through the market for corporate control, and through the internal constraints imposed via statutes and monitoring by the owners themselves (see Estrin and Perotin, 1991).
In Anglo-Saxon countries, the constraints on managerial discretion in large part derive from stock markets (see Megginson, 2005). The quality of managerial decision-making and the extent of managerial discretion are an input in the choices of traders in equity markets, whose judgement on company performance is summarised in the share price. If the managerial team is thought to be incompetent or inefficient, the share prices will be reduced, putting pressure on managers to improve their performance. A persistently poor showing by a quoted company may also generate external pressure by encouraging a take-over bid. In this case, the stock market can be viewed as a market for corporate control, with alternative teams vying for the right to manage the enterprise. However, the effectiveness of these disciplines rely to some extent on the concentration of ownership. If ownership is highly dispersed, each individual owner has only a slight incentive to monitor effectively, and there is a free rider problem so monitoring may be inadequate.
Governance also comes from the way that the managerial market operates, with managerial performance, pay and job prospects assessed by movements in share prices. Payment mechanisms
such as management stock option schemes can also be put in place to align the incentives of owners and managers. In countries such as Japan or Germany, however, the mechanisms can be different, with less reliance on an adversarial market for corporate control and more extensive use of internal governance constraints. Ownership is typically highly concentrated into the hands of banks, funds or families who are granted board representation and undertake close monitoring of managerial
performance directly, and use the managerial market and management incentive schemes.
Either way, it is hard for the state to imitate these market-based constraints. State owned firms are not subject to private capital market disciplines, so neither the competitively driven informational structure nor the market based governance mechanisms can be substituted for in full. State
employees are usually civil servants and do not compete in the wider managerial market, though Western governments have recently tried to reduce the labor market segmentation between the public and private sectors. Moreover, though the government’s ownership stake is concentrated, the state is rarely directly represented on the boards of public sector companies and usually does not have the capacity in the supervisory ministries to undertake the necessary scale and quality of monitoring (see Vickers and Yarrow, 1985).
These arguments have particular resonance in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. The economic problems of the socialist system was largely a result of the impact of state ownership and planning on investment allocation, incentives and efficiency (see Gregory and Stuart, 2004). Firms did not attempt to maximise profits, and productive efficiency was a low priority. Instead, weak monitoring of managers by the state as owner and the absence of external constraints gave management almost total discretion to follow their own objectives – rent absorption, asset stripping, employment, social targets. The softness of budget constraints (Kornai, 1990) that goes with the political determination of resource allocation was a further source of incentive problems, since
managers did not have to bear the consequences for their own actions. Mistakes were condoned and losses were subsidized.
Methods of Privatisation in Transition Economies
It is therefore clear why privatization was so important in the transition process. Nonetheless, reforming governments might in principle have left privatisation until the track records of particular firms in the market environment had become firmly established and until the stock of domestic savings in private hands was sufficient to ensure the success of a competitive bidding process for the assets. But the state was probably not able to manage its assets effectively in the intervening period and managers and workers began very rapidly to steal the assets (Canning and Hare, 1994). The collapse of
communism had left state owned firms with limited internal structure to handle the new requirements of the marketplace and no mechanisms to monitor or enforce governance on state owned firms (see Blanchard et al., 1991). The authorities had either quickly to create structures whereby the state as owner could control enterprise decisions or face a gradual dissipation of the net worth of the enterprise sector by consumption, waste or theft. These stark alternatives persuaded many reforming
governments and their Western advisors to consider rapid privatisation1.
The sheer scale of privatization required in the transition economies posed considerable practical problems. As we have seen, the communist heritage meant that the majority of firms in the economy needed to be privatized. At the aggregate level, the stock of domestic private savings in these countries was too small to purchase the assets being offered. This led the reformers to innovate with privatization methods.
For selected firms, many transition economies used auction or public tender methods as have been the norm in the West. Such sales could in principle be to domestic or foreign purchasers but, in practice, only Hungary and Estonia were willing or able to sell an appreciable share of former state-owned assets to foreigners. Foreign capital ended up purchasing about 20 percent of the privatized assets in Hungary and up
1
Boycko, Shleifer and Vishny (1995) - the former an insider to Russia policy making at the time - make a similar point concerning Russia. They argue that Russia had to undertake a massive and speedy ownership change in order to break the tradition of rent seeking behaviour and the long-standing links between the state and the enterprise sector. They argue that, in order to gain political support for the privatisation process, substantial stakes had to be given to insiders - the managers and workers in firms - so that they did not block the process.
to 50 percent in Estonia, but even in these countries, the preponderance of foreign ownership gave rise to public disquiet. Moreover, foreign direct investment flows to the transition economies were modest in the early years, when privatization was taking place, and were highly concentrated towards Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland (UN, 2004), (Meyer, 1998). In practice sales of state owned enterprises have mainly been to a country's own citizens: either to external capital owners or to insider management-employee buyouts. Managers and employees were the more common initial buyers, perhaps because they had insider knowledge about their company’s business prospects. Some governments, such as in Romania, actively encouraged the emergence of insider-owned firms.
Some countries also experimented with restitution to former owners; the former East Germany, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria are prominent examples. Restitution has the advantage that it immediately creates a property-owning middle class and re-establishes "real ownership." However, the process of restitution entails legal complexities. For example, suppose that a factory has been built on a plot of land formerly owned by a noble. Does the noble receive the land back, and therefore rental for the factory? Or should the noble be compensated for the value of the property at the time of its seizure and if so how is such an evaluation to be made some 80 years later? Restitution also raises the deep question of how the assets accumulated during the communist era, when consumption levels were held down for national capital accumulation, should be distributed. Since the burden of lower consumption was imposed on everyone, the argument that the distribution of the resulting assets should be egalitarian has been a powerful one.
To increase the pace of privatization, a number of transition countries began to experiment with "mass privatization." This entails placing into private hands nominal assets of a value sufficient to purchase the state firms to be privatized. To avoid the inflationary consequences of such wide-scale "money" creation, the new assets must be non-transferable and not valid for any transaction other than the purchase of state assets. This was largely achieved using the instrument of privatization vouchers or certificates. It was hoped that any deficiencies in the resulting corporate governance mechanism arising from the fact that the ownership structure was initially diffuse would be addressed by capital market pressures leading to increased ownership concentration (Boycko, Shleifer, Vishny, 1995).
Mass privatization has been carried out in a number of different ways, but the differences can be summarized around two issues. The first was whether the vouchers or certificates were distributed on an egalitarian basis to the population as a whole or whether, as in Russia and many CIS states, management and employee groups received many of the shares, perhaps to diffuse potential opposition to privatization. Second, policymakers needed to determine whether vouchers were intended to be exchanged directly for shares in companies, or whether the vouchers should be in funds that own a number of different companies. In the Czech and Slovak republics and in Russia, vouchers were exchanged directly for shares, although financial intermediaries soon developed onto the market. In the Polish scheme, vouchers were exchanged for shares in government-created funds that jointly owned former state-owned enterprises.
Every country used a variety of privatization methods and everywhere different sorts of firms were sold in different ways. For example, in most transition economies small firms were usually sold to the highest bidder, and utilities were often floated on stock markets. However, it was possible by the time the bulk of privatization was completed in the late 1990s to discern the predominant method used in each country, and we report the most widely used summary in Table 1 from the EBRD’s Transition Report, 1998. Mass privatization was the most common privatization method across the transition economies; nineteen of the 25 countries listed used some form of mass privatization as either a primary or secondary method. Moreover, Management Employee Buyouts (MEBOs) also proved important, perhaps because transition governments sometimes did not have the authority to take on entrenched insiders in firms. Thus nine countries used MEBOs as their primary method, with six more using them as their secondary method. Most transition economies therefore eschewed the conventional method of privatization, by direct sale. In fact, only five countries used this as their primary privatization method though these were among the most developed transitional economies.
The Scale of Privatization
There was an extremely speedy ownership change in most transition economies. Few countries had contained a private sector of any significance in 1990. Exceptions were Hungary and Poland, where there
had been longstanding private firm in agriculture and crafts, and the private sector already represented over 30 percent of GDP (see Estrin, 1994). But in the transition economies as a whole, the private sector contribution to GDP was usually less than 20 percent. The growth in the private sector share during the 1990s, reported in Table 2, is extraordinary. As early as 1995, the private sector share was above 50 percent in nine countries, though in eight former republics of the Soviet Union, it remained below 30%. By 2002, the private sector in thirteen additional nations had reached at least 50 percent of GDP and only two laggards, Belarus and Turkmenistan, still had private sector activity below 25 percent of GDP. Thus the privatization process in the transition economies was in many countries effective in transferring the bulk of economic activity from state to private hands in the space of hardly more than a decade.
This remarkable performance should not conceal real concerns raised at the time about the quality of privatization, and therefore about its consequences for enterprise restructuring. First, there are questions about how real the privatization has been. In many transition economies, the state continued to own golden shares or significant shareholdings in companies. For example, the Russian state retained more than a 20 percent share in 37 percent of privatized firms, and kept more than a 40 percent share in 14 percent of the firms that it privatized. Only in half of privatized firms did the Russian government sell its entire holding. Thus, the clean break between the state as owner and the enterprise sector has perhaps been more notional than real. In a survey of privatized firms undertaken by the EBRD in 1999, reported in Table 3, we show that in 20 of the 23 countries, the state has retained some shares post-privatization. On average, the state retained some shares in around 20 percent of privatized firms, with more than a 20 percent shareholding in around 12 percent of the firms. It is suggestive that retained state shareholdings are negligible in some of the leading transition economies; e.g., the Czech Republic, Hungary and Latvia, but the state has tended to keep a larger share in less advanced transition economies; more than 15 percent of privatized firms in Albania, Belarus, Georgia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine, and more than 30 percent of privatized firms in Bulgaria, Croatia, Slovenia and Uzbekistan. Retained state ownership has also occurred in many developed OECD economies, including the use of “golden shares”. According to Bostolotti and Faccio (2006), governments were actually the largest stakeholder or held special control powers (golden shares) in 62.4% of
But widespread retained state ownership is not the only indication that privatization may not have ensured the establishment of effective corporate governance mechanisms in transition economies. The long "agency chains" implicit in mass privatization may not provide appropriate incentives for corporate governance. Voucher privatization led to ownership structures that were highly dispersed (Coffee, 1996). Typically the entire adult population of the country, or all insiders to each firm, were allocated vouchers with which to purchase the shares of the company. The desire for equitable and politically acceptable outcomes dominated the need to create concentrated external owners who would have a large enough stake to be motivated to maintain oversight of management. However, it was possible that financial intermediaries could aggregate individual voucher holdings and carry out effective monitoring of management and in Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia and Slovakia, some effort was made to ensure such concentrated intermediate agents did emerge. This was often associated with fraud and the outright theft of assets by managers to avoid their use by the new owners; so called “tunnelling” (Johnson et. al., 2000)
The way that mass privatization was carried out in many countries also sometimes led to majority ownership that was not best suited to accelerate restructuring, for example by insiders. This was probably largely for political reasons, especially in countries where the pro-reform forces were politically weak. According to Earle and Estrin (1997), insiders held a majority shareholding in 75 percent of firms in Russia immediately post-privatization (1994) and outsiders only 9 percent. Insider ownership was predominantly in the hands of workers. However, this created little problem for management because worker ownership was so highly dispersed. Indeed Blasi, Kroumova and Kruse (1997) argue that control was effectively in the hands of management in Russian employee owned firms. Outsider ownership is also typically highly dispersed, with much of it in the hands of banks, suppliers, other firms and an assortment of investment funds. In Russia, it appears from a variety of studies that outside shareholding has increased at the expense of the state and insiders during the 1990s, but ownership is also becoming increasingly dispersed and the greater degree of outside ownership may largely represent the fact that former insider voucher owners have left the firm but retained their shares.
This pattern of extensive employee ownership seems broadly consistent with the evidence for other CIS countries. In Ukraine, insiders owned 51 percent of shares in all privatized firms in 1997 - managers 8
percent and workers 43 percent - while outsiders held 38 percent and the state residue share was 11 percent. In Ukraine, insiders have actually increased their shareholdings, while managers have been buying shares from workers. Thus, rather than evolving towards the structure of a firms owned by a concentrated group of outsiders, as was hoped by reformers, enterprises in the CIS appear to have remained primarily owned by dispersed groups of employees or outsiders. However, the situation appears to have been somewhat different in central Europe, where many of the most important firms in the economies are now quoted on the relevant national stock exchanges or owned by large foreign firms, e.g., Skoda and Volkswagen. As we have seen foreign ownership was predominant in Hungary, ownership by new entrepreneurs was common in Poland while investment fund ownership predominated in the Czech Republic.
The Impact of Privatization
In this section, we analyze the impact of privatization on economic and company performance in the transition economies. This can be considered from the macro-economic and micro-economic side, and we provide some information on both. We start by considering the effects on government resources, and exploring the relationship between private sector shares, privatization methods and revenues and economic growth. We then go on to summarize the findings of the very large literature about the effects of privatization on company performance.
In Table 4, we present the cumulative revenues from privatization in each of the transition economies, 1995 – 2002. The sums were relatively modest in most countries in 1995; cumulative revenues were less than 2% of GDP in fifteen countries of the 23 covered, and only exceeded 20% in GDP in one country, Hungary. The situation had changed appreciably by 2002. Cumulative revenues from privatization exceeded 5% of GDP in fourteen countries, exceeded 10% of GDP in eight and were greater than 30% in Hungary and Slovakia. Thus even in countries which used mass privatization, the selling of state assets proved to be a significant source of government revenue through the financially demanding period of early transition, and may therefore have contributed to macro-stability and growth.
Urga (2006) explore the impact of privatization on growth, but while they identify a positive effect from the use of the mass privatization method, they do not find any significant relationship between growth and the private sector share. There is a limited amount of academic work for other economies which explores the impact of privatization on growth rates. In an early study, Plane (1997) looks at the effects of divestiture on growth in a sample of thirty five developing countries. He also controls for the problem of reverse causality by identifying separately what factors that determine a successful privatization programme He finds that the impact of privatization on economic growth is indeed positive, and is strengthened when privatization occurs in infrastructure or in industrial sectors. Sachs, Zinnes and Eilat (2000) use a fairly short sample period to undertake an aggregate growth study for the transition economies. They conclude that, while privatization does not actually increase growth, there is a positive impact when the privatization process is accompanied by institutional reforms.
Turning to the micro-economic evidence, there have been a large number of studies of how privatization affects the performance of firms in transition economies. The most complete study of the impact of privatization on firms is by Djankov and Murrell (2002) which surveys the findings of more than 100 empirical studies of transition economies and uses a meta-analysis of the results to draw
conclusions. Despite the plethora of material, the overall findings remain ambiguous. This is partly because the studies employ a variety of data sets, measurements and methods which produce
contradictory results. For example there are a large number of ways of measuring company performance including profitability, productivity, sales growth, export growth, and restructuring and findings differ between them. Commencing with productivity, there is a wide variance in results across countries and samples, with private ownership found to yield positive, zero or negative effects depending on the study. There is however convincing evidence that privatization to foreign owners yields a positive effect, and that privatization is more likely to improve performance in Central Europe than in the former Soviet Union. More recent literature strongly confirms the results with respect to foreign direct investment (e.g.
Sabirianova, Svejnar and Terrell, 2006) However, it is harder to discern positive effects from privatization when profitability is the performance measure, though once again some studies find a positive impact when the firm is privatized to a foreign owner, and very few studies isolate a positive significant effect
from privatization on revenues. There are fewer studies of the impact of privatization on exports, and these tend to be positive, especially when foreigners take over the former state owned firm, and restructuring activity seems to have been significantly greater in privatized firms in Central Europe, but not significantly so in Russia, Ukraine and other countries of the former Soviet Union.
The variation in results is not merely a consequence of the wide variety of measures and
countries upon which the effects of privatization has been tested. Some serious methodological problems bedevil work of this sort, most importantly that of selection. This is the situation when firms with particular characteristics – for example superior performance- were systematically chosen for privatization. In such a case, while one observes what appears to be superior performance among firms that have been privatized, the correct interpretation is not that privatization enhances performance but that it was the better firms that were chosen for privatization. The converse applies if the state chooses to keep the best firms for itself and only to sell the less productive ones; in this case, privatization will appear to lead to worse performance. Unfortunately, very few studies of privatization in the transition economies have been able to do much to address this problem of reverse causality. The data sets upon which the empirical work has been based have been small and usually derived from sample survey questionnaires that did not contain sufficient information to control for the selection problem.
Even so, Djankov and Murrell (2002) conclude on the basis of the weight of the evidence that the impact of privatization on company performance has probably been positive and significant, though not in every circumstance. Two factors are usually cited as being particularly influential in determining whether privatization acts to enhance company performance. The first is the nature and characteristics of the new private owners. We noted that foreign owners lead to an improvement in most measures of performance. There is also some evidence, though it is less convincing, that privatization to domestic private owners also improves performance, though it can be important for the ownership shares to be concentrated. However, there is almost no evidence that company performance is improved when firms are privatized to insiders, either managers or workers. This is probably because insiders have exploited their control to resist the changes in behaviour required to make firms competitive in the market environment, rather than
especially in the former Soviet Union, and this probably goes some way to explain the weaker economic performance in many of those countries, compared to, for example, much of central Europe e.g. Hungary, Poland and the Czech republic, where foreign direct investment flows were much greater.
The second factor is the institutional and business environment in which privatization takes place. We noted above that privatization relies on improved corporate governance, but that in turn depends on a competitive market environment and the enforcement of property rights. In countries where the legal system is not functioning effectively, and businesses face high level of corruption and weak standards of financial discipline, it is hard to imagine how private ownership on its own might be expected to improve company performance. For example, sharper performance is meant to come from tighter financial disciplines to eradicate waste and reduce cost, but these will not bind in situations when budget
constraints remain soft, as occurred post-privatization in many countries of the former Soviet Union, with firms financing their deficits, not through direct government subsidised but by not paying their bills, especially to their workers, to the government in taxes, and to the state owned utility companies.
These two limiting factors affect some privatizations in all transition economies, but on average have been more likely to pertain in the economies of the former Soviet Union than those of Central and Eastern Europe. Thus while the macro-economic work suggests a clear positive impact from privatization on economic growth, the results from the micro-economic literature are more modulated. The positive effects from privatization are found not to be automatic. They depend on to whom the firm was privatized – foreigners, outsiders or insiders, and on the broader business environment in which the firm operates. The latter in particular tends to be better in Central Europe and especially in the new Accession
economies to the European Union. Privatization methods may also have played an important role (see Bennett, Estrin, Urga, 2005).
Conclusion
The most impressive feature of privatization in the transition economies has been the speed and scale at which it occurred. The reforming governments of the late 1980s and early 1990s managed
successfully to transfer the huge state owned sector into largely private hands in a time period of hardly more than a decade and to do so they had to use innovative privatization methods. However, this led them to introduce private ownership into situations where other crucial aspects of the business
environment were not yet sufficiently developed to support the private economy. We find that privatization appears to have provided governments with much needed revenues. However, at the enterprise level the results on performance are more patchy, though on balance the effects of privatization have probably been positive, especially when the new owners were foreigners. The most serious problem for
privatization as a policy has been in situations where it has been used while the legal and institutional environment is weak. In such cases, it rarely appears to have improved company performance.
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Table 1: Methods of privatisation in Central and Eastern Europe
Source: Transition Report 1998, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development * Management employee buyouts
PRIMARY METHOD SECONDARY METHOD
COUNTRY Direct sales MEBOs* Vouchers Direct sales MEBOs* Vouchers
Albania + + Armenia + + Azerbaijan + + Belarus + + Bulgaria + + Croatia + + Czech Republic + + Estonia + + FYR Macedonia + + Georgia + + Hungary + + Kazakhstan + + Kyrgyzstan + + Latvia + + Lithuania + + Moldova + + Poland + + Romania + + Russia + + Slovak Republic + + Slovenia + + Tajikistan + + Turkmenistan + + Ukraine + + Uzbekistan + +
Table 2: Private sector share in GDP and employment in Eastern Europe, 1989-94 In GDP In Employment 1991 1995 2002 1991 1995 2001 Albania 24 60 75 .. 74 82 Armenia .. 45 70 29 49 .. Azerbaijan .. 25 60 .. 43 .. Belarus 7 15 25 2 7 ..
Bosnia and Herzegovina .. .. 45 .. .. ..
Bulgaria 17 50 75 10 41 81 Croatia 25 40 60 22 48 .. Czech Republic 17 70 80 19 57 70 Estonia 18 65 80 11 .. .. FYR Macedonia .. 40 60 .. .. .. Georgia 27 30 65 25 .. .. Hungary 33 60 80 … 71 … Kazakhstan 12 25 65 5 .. 75 Kyrgyz Republic .. 40 65 .. 69 79 Latvia .. 55 70 12 60 73 Lithuania 15 65 75 16 … … Moldova .. 30 50 36 .. .. Poland 45 60 75 51 61 72 Romania 24 45 65 34 51 75 Russia 10 55 70 5 .. ..
Serbia and Montenegro .. .. 45 .. .. ..
Slovak Republic .. 60 80 13 60 75 Slovenia 16 50 65 18 48 .. Tajikistan .. 25 50 .. 53 63 Turkmenistan .. 15 25 .. .. .. Ukraine 8 45 65 .. .. .. Uzbekistan .. 30 45 .. .. .. Means 20 44 62
Table 3:
Retained State Shareholdings in Privatised Firms in Transition
Country 0% 1-30% >30% Albania 83.9 0 16.2 Armenia 97.1 2.9 0 Azerbaijan 94.1 5.9 0 Belarus 80.4 10.7 8.9 Bulgaria 30.8 61.6 7.7 Croatia 59.1 33.4 7.6 Czech Republic 100 0 0 Estonia 92.3 3.9 3.9 Georgia 79.3 7 13.8 Hungary 100 0 0 Kazakhstan 93.6 2.1 4.2 Kyrgyz Republic 91.2 1.8 7.1 Latvia 100 0 0 Lithuania 80.8 19.3 0 Macedonia (FYR) 92.9 0 7.1 Moldova 87.7 5.4 7.1 Poland 71.7 13.3 15.1 Romania 80 13.4 6.7 Russia 82.6 8.7 8.7 Slovak Republic 92.3 7.7 0 Slovenia 63 24.1 13 Ukraine 83.6 9.6 6.8 Uzbekistan 69.2 27 3.9 Total 80.9 11.8 6.3
Table 4:
Privatisation revenues (cumulative, in % of GDP) 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 Albania 3.1 3.3 3.6 3.6 3.9 7.0 9.1 9.1
Armenia 3.4 3.4 3.4 5.6 6.7 8.8 9.4 9.7
Azerbaijan 0.0 0.1 0.3 0.9 1.5 1.7 2.0 2.4
Belarus 0.5 0.7 0.9 1.0 1.1 1.1 1.2 2.9
Bosnia and Herzegovina 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 2.0 2.8 2.9
Bulgaria 0.7 1.5 4.6 6.2 8.4 9.7 10.3 11.2 Croatia 0.9 1.4 2.0 3.6 8.2 10.2 13.5 15.8 Czech Republic 4.6 6.3 7.1 7.9 9.3 10.3 13.1 18.7 Estonia 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.3 4.2 5.2 7.2 7.6 Georgia 19.1 19.8 20.5 21.8 22.7 23.0 23.1 … Hungary 20.8 23.4 27.5 28.6 29.8 30.2 30.6 30.6 Kazakhstan 3.7 5.9 9.2 13.0 14.8 15.6 16.1 16.6 Kyrgyz Republic 0.9 1.3 1.4 1.6 1.9 2.1 2.5 2.7 Latvia 0.7 0.8 2.2 3.3 3.5 4.1 4.7 5.4 Lithuania 1.4 1.4 1.6 6.8 8.0 9.8 10.8 11.3 Moldova 0.8 1.3 3.6 4.4 5.4 11.1 11.1 … Poland 2.6 3.6 5.1 6.4 7.7 11.4 12.2 12.6 Romania 1.2 2.2 4.6 6.4 7.6 8.2 8.9 9.0 Russia 1.5 1.7 2.7 3.4 3.5 3.8 4.2 4.5 Slovak Republic 8.4 10.2 10.8 11.5 11.8 16.3 20.1 35.1 Slovenia 0.4 0.9 1.4 2.2 2.5 2.5 2.7 4.9 Tajikistan 1.5 1.7 2.3 2.8 3.6 4.6 4.8 5.8 Turkmenistan 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.2 0.3 0.6 0.6 0.6
