Authors thank a referee of this journal for many helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Privatization in Poland What was the government trying to achieve?1
Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2009
© 2009 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2009 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
Economics of Transition
Volume 17, Issue 3, pages 531–557, July 2009
How to Cite
De Fraja, G. and Roberts, B. M. (2009), Privatization in Poland What was the government trying to achieve?. Economics of Transition, 17: 531–557. doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0351.2009.00356.x
- Issue online: 15 JUN 2009
- Version of Record online: 15 JUN 2009
- Received: June 25, 2007; Acceptance: December 8, 2008
- Eastern Europe;
- mixed oligopoly
This article uses the sequencing of privatization to infer the objective pursued by the Polish government in the privatization of its large manufacturing firms in the second half of the 1990s. We construct a model of mixed oligopoly and use it to evaluate the privatization process; our analysis is based on the assumption that firms which furthered the government's objective function the most would be chosen to be privatized first. Based on the features of the firms that were chosen for early privatization, our empirical analysis suggests that welfare maximization was more important than the desire to maximize the revenues from privatization and the government's budget or to minimize employment losses.