Private Ownership and Corporate Performance: Evidence from Transition Economies

01/1997 · World Bank Publications

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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.