Discussion paper

DP6114 Privatisation in Poland: What Was the Government Trying to Achieve?

This paper uses the sequencing of privatisation to infer the objective pursued by the Polish government in the privatisation of its large manufacturing firms in the second half of the 1990's. We construct a model of mixed oligopoly, and use it to evaluate the privatisation process; our analysis is based on the assumption that firms which furthered the government's objective function the most would be chosen to be privatised first. Our empirical analysis identifies the features of the firms that were chosen for early privatisation, and suggests that the welfare maximisation was more important than the desire to maximise the revenues from privatisation and the government's budget, or to minimise employment losses.

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Citation

De Fraja, G and B Roberts (2007), ‘DP6114 Privatisation in Poland: What Was the Government Trying to Achieve?‘, CEPR Discussion Paper No. 6114. CEPR Press, Paris & London. https://cepr.org/publications/dp6114