The Gains from Privatization in Transition Economies: Is “Change of Ownership” Enough?

By Clifford F. Zinnes, Y. Eilat, J. Sachs. International Monetary Fund Staff Papers, 2001

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper seeks to clarify what factors contributed to the macroeconomic gains and losses from privatization in transition economies over the past decade. In contrast to the original “Washington Consensus,” which had a tendency to equate change-of-title with privatization, we find that economic performance gains come only from “deep” privatization, that is, when change-of-title reforms occur once key institutional and "agency"-related reforms have exceeded certain threshold levels. We also find that as a result of different initial conditions the economic performance responses of countries to the same policies are different.

Subfields: Accounting, Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/297bbe360ab0cb9b03d558bcf5a01666abdfd643

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Oleh Havrylyshyn
2. John Nellis
3. N. Birdsall

In Political Science and International Relations

1. Oleh Havrylyshyn
2. John Nellis
3. N. Birdsall
4. Axel Dreher
5. M. Gassebner

In Strategy and Management

1. Oleh Havrylyshyn
2. John Nellis

Citations in the corpus

• Winners and Losers: Assessing the Distributional Impact of Privatization (2003, background): “In one of the only efforts to review econometrically the question, Zinnes, Eilat, and Sachs (2001) analyze the relative power of ownership versus nonownership reform factors in ex- plaining privatization outcomes in transition economies.”
• Recovery and Growth in Transition: A Decade of Evidence (2001, background): “One of the most recent studies on privatization (Zinnes, Eilat, and Sachs, 2001, in this Special Issue of IMF Staff Papers) goes much farther in trying to disentangle the effects of formal change of ownership and the market environment facing firms.”
• Post-privatization corporate governance and firm performance: The role of private ownership concentration, identity and board composition (2009, unknown): “At the macro level, a cross-country aggregate study by Zinnes et al. (2001) finds that privatization does not by itself increase GDP growth, but it suggests that a positive effect exists when privatization is accompanied by in-depth institutional reforms.”