Buy-outs in Hungary,Poland and Russia: governance and finance issues1

The governments of Hungary, Poland and Russia have used buy-outs as an important privatization strategy which can be viewed as forming a continuum from straightforward sales where management and employees generally achieve significant ownership, as in Hungary, via intermediate approaches as in Poland where both payment and free distribution of shares are involved, to the Russian case where state-owned enterprises were effectively “given away” through a voucher privatization scheme. This paper, first, presents preliminary evidence on the extent and nature of post-privatization restructuring in buy-outs in these three countries, which highlights the transitory nature of this form of organization. Second, in the light of these findings, the paper analyses the possibilities and difficulties associated with enhancing corporate governance and finance.     

The restructuring of large firms in the Slovak Republic1

This paper examines case study evidence of large Slovak firms chosen to represent a wide range of initial conditions, privatization techniques and success with restructuring. We document the ownership changes and restructuring actions of firms. We then re-examine several hypotheses about firm restructuring in the light of this new evidence. In particular, we show that the majority of large Slovak firms have successfully restructured in the absence of foreign investors and government-led restructuring programmes. The study also generates some new queries on the effectiveness of different privatization methods in enhancing corporate governance and improving access to skills and capital. We find that privatization to insiders through management-employee buy-outs did not hamper firm restructuring, at least in the initial years after privatization, as the new owners (old managers) invested heavily in new technology, laid off a substantial part of their workforce, sought foreign partnerships, and were prepared to sell controlling stakes to outsiders in return for fresh financial resources. The evidence also suggests that the mass privatization programme in the Slovak Republic did not result in weak corporate governance since it was followed by a rapid consolidation of outsider ownership. This is in contrast to the anecdotal evidence for Georgia, Russia and Ukraine which opted for mass privatization to insiders (managers and employees)     

Post-privatization corporate governance and firm performance: The role of private ownership concentration,identity and board composition

We examine and analyze the post-privatization corporate governance of a sample of 52 newly privatized Egyptian firms over a period of 10 years, from 1995 to 2005. We look at the ownership structure that results from privatization and its evolution; the determinants of private ownership concentration; and the impact of private ownership concentration, identity and board composition on firm performance. We find that the state gives up control over time to the private sector, but still controls, on average, more than 35% of these firms. We also document a trend in private ownership concentration over time, mostly to the benefit of foreign investors. Firm size, sales growth, industry affiliation, and timing and method of privatization seem to play a key role in determining private ownership concentration. Ownership concentration and ownership identity, in particular foreign investors, prove to have a positive impact on firm performance, while employee ownership concentration has a negative one. The higher proportion of outside directors and the change in the board composition following privatization have a positive effect on firm performance. These results could have some important policy implications where private ownership by foreign investors seems to add more value to firms, while selling state-owned enterprises (SOEs) to employees is not recommended. Also, the state is highly advised to relinquish control and allow for changes in the board of directors following privatization as changing ownership, per se, might not have a positive impact on firm performance unless it is coupled with a new management style.     

员工个人特征对ESOP激励效果的影响——对HD公司的案例研究

以HD公司为研究对象,运用实地访谈和因子分析、方差分析等统计分析方法,研究员工个人特征通过激励机制对ESOP实施效果的影响。结果表明,公司员工整体素质影响了ESOP的实施效果;不同工龄的员工在工作态度上具有显著性差异;不同文化程度、工龄和岗位层次的员工在获利预期上具有显著性差异。根据这些结果,笔者就完善ESOP的实施提出了建议。     

THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISES: PERSPECTIVES FROM THE CANADIAN EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT: Public enterprises have been an integral part of the involvement of the state in the economy for most of the 20th century. After 1980, privatization has been the dominant trend until the 2008–2010 economic crisis when new nationalizations happened. Ownership is only an element of a complex system of relations between a public enterprise and its institutional environment where the role of the board of directors, the mechanisms of coordination, the role of senior civil servants, etc. come to play. Using the Canadian experience with public enterprises, we suggest in this article that public enterprises could be interesting economic policy instruments in the future as in the past if such an economic policy exists. In other words, privatization did not solve the control issue over many large enterprises. Improved corporate governance should be considered. This article aims at improving the understanding of how by focusing on various aspects of the governance of public enterprises on their potential use and work. In Canada, public enterprises have been used to face the recent global crisis but they also come from a long tradition of intervention in the economy, a tradition closer to the European than the American. After reviewing recent developments in their governance, paths for future research are proposed.     

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE AND VOUCHER BUY-OUTS IN RUSSIA

This paper examines the issues which may create pressures and incentives to introduce efficiency-enhancing governance structures in enterprises which are privatized through voucher schemes in Russia. These pressures emphasize the need to view buy-outs created on privatization as transitory organizational forms with a three-stage process being suggested as the most feasible for developing governance mechanisms which produce efficiency gains, The paper uses illustrative case studies of the first major enterprises to experience post-privatization ownership changes.     

员工持股、信息透明度与企业创新 ——基于员工持股计划的准自然实验

自2014年6月证监会重启员工持股计划以来,已有超过8%的上市公司推出员工持股计划预案。以2010—2017年A股上市公司为研究样本,基于多时点DID研究框架,用以控制可能存在的内生性问题。实证检验企业实施员工持股计划（ESOP）对企业创新活动的影响效果,以此揭示中国混合所有制改革背景下实施员工持股计划（ESOP）的真实效果。结果发现：实施ESOP的企业相较于未实施ESOP的企业具有更高的创新产出,并且在信息透明度更高的企业中这种促进作用更显著;相比于国有企业,在非国有企业实施ESOP对创新活动的促进作用更强。进一步通过中介效应对机制进行检验发现,实施ESOP后可以提高管理层创新意愿进而促进创新投入。研究揭示了ESOP对企业创新活动影响可能存在的作用机制,对广大投资者理解ESOP公司治理作用具有一定启示意义。     

职工持股法律制度的若干问题研究

职工持股制度(简称ESOP或ESOPs)从20世纪50年代中期开始,在西方国家特别是美国和日本普遍推行,它已成为企业中一个重要的制度。文章针对职工持股法律制度的具体问题进行了分析。首先,对职工持股制在实践中的若干具体问题的探讨,集中于职工持股制度适用的企业和职工范围、职工股占总股本的份额、职工购股资金、预留股的设置、职工股的流转等问题的讨论。其次,对中国职工持股制度中问题提出了立法建议。     

THE GOVERNANCE OF PUBLIC ENTERPRISES: THE QUEBEC EXPERIENCE

ABSTRACT ** ** Résumé en fin d'article; Zusammenfassung am Ende des Artikels; resumen al fin del artículo.
: Have public enterprises become obsolete policy instruments? Should they be privatized or can their governance be radically transformed so that they could still be used as policy instruments? The world around them has changed and forced governments to move. After a discussion on the arguments in favour of privatization, this article suggests an analysis of three cases in the Canadian province of Quebec. Considering the pressures linked to the liberalization of trade resulting from NAFTA, this article suggests that the governance of public enterprises can be transformed and adapted and that consequently, it is not useful or necessary to privatize them. There is in reality a lot of room in the public enterprise governance to reform them, room that has been neglected over the last decades.     

Methods of privatization and economic growth in transition economies1

We examine how different methods of privatization might have affected growth in transition economies. Using several econometric specifications, including fixed effects and GMM, we estimate a cross‐country panel growth model for 1990–2003. We find only voucher privatization to have been significantly associated with faster growth. Moreover, neither private sector development per se nor capital market development exercised a significant influence. We speculate that voucher privatization may have been effective because of the speed with which links between firms and the state were severed.     

China’s secondary privatization: new evidence on controlling shareholders tunnelling

This article utilizes the 2005 split-share structure reform (SSSR) in China as a natural experiment and conducts difference-in-differences (DID) tests to analyse corporate governance changes among Chinese SOEs compared to POEs. We show that tunnelling significantly reduced in both POEs and SOEs after the SSSR. More importantly, we find a significant and positive ‘privatization effect’ on SOEs’ tunnelling activities during the post-reform period suggesting the reductions of tunnelling were smaller among SOEs than POEs following the SSSR. In contrast, excess returns around the SSSR indicate that investors expected a negative ‘privatization effect’ on SOEs’ tunnelling. These findings suggest that the quality of corporate governance did not improve among SOEs as a result of the secondary privatization as the stock market expected without fundamental changes to firm ownership and control following the SSSR. The benefits of privatization accrue to the government controlling shareholders rather than minority investors.     

Innovation and new public water

ABSTRACT

Technological innovation has made significant improvements to water services but water delivery remains largely unchanged since Victorian times. This is because water is an essential, non-substitutable resource with little potential for economies of scale. By contrast, there has been dynamic innovation in the governance of water services, with privatization now giving way to a significant shift back to public ownership and management, with new and creative forms of societal engagement. This article reviews these governance changes through the lens of a “hydrosocial cycle”, arguing that innovations in “new public water” can only be achieved by recognizing how water-society relations take place.     

Employee Stock Ownership and Participation in South Korea: Incidence, Productivity Effects, and Prospects

The paper examines employee stock ownership plans in South Korea. The incidence and characteristics of ESOPs in publicly traded manufacturing firms is reported. Korean employees do not participate in ESOPs either financially or in decision-making to the extent they could under the law. Evidence that tax incentives have very large effects on ESOP purchases is presented. Econometric estimates suggest that an increase in an average ESOP from 2% to 3% of total shares would lead to an increase in output of 2.6%. These results are broadly consistent with OECD countries, despite the smaller ownership shared and weaker employee decision-making participation in Korea. The policy analysis concludes that ESOPs in Korea are not suitable for pensions; that it is not in employee interests to purchase all shares through initial public offerings (IPOs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs); that incentives for longer stock-holding periods may be appropriate; that improvement in decision-making participation is desirable; and that changes in repayment methods could make it more attractive for employees to purchase shares.     

Public Enterprise Privatization: A General Equilibrium Analysis

This paper develops a general equilibrium model to examine the short‐run and long‐run optimal privatization policies. By assuming that all firms are public firms initially, the paper focuses on how the degree of product differentiation γ and the average efficiency of the industry influence the determination of the optimal privatization policy. The paper shows that privatization decreases the more efficient firms' outputs while increases the less efficient firms' outputs in the short run, and reduces all firms' outputs in the long run. The paper also shows that the larger is γ and the smaller is the number of firms, the more privatized will be the public firm in the short run. Moreover, as γ or the entry barrier f_E is sufficiently small, full privatization is the best policy in the long run. On the contrary, as γ and f_E are large enough, partial privatization is optimal.     

Privatization and efficiency wages

The impact of privatization is investigated in a shirking model of efficiency wages. Without trade unions, privatization — modeled as a stricter control of employees — lowers wages and raises employment, output, and profits, while effort and productivity effects depend on the employees' risk aversion. However, for a utilitarian monopoly union, facing a company characterized by a constant-elasticity labor-demand schedule, privatization raises efficiency wages. If privatization is modeled as a stronger profit orientation, wages, effort, and labor productivity will rise, while employment will shrink in a wage-setting firm. Again, wage and employment effects can be reversed in the case of wage negotiations.     

Ownership, exit and voice after mass privatizationEvidence from Mongolia

Exit (owners selling their shares) and voice (owners active in corporate activities) are important ingredients in the process by which mass privatization changes managerial behaviour in transition countries. We examine the structure of ownership and the extent of exit and voice in one such country, Mongolia. We document the size of ownership changes since privatization (through mergers, spin-offs, and stock sales) and examine which owners are changing in importance. We scrutinize enterprise governance, examining patterns of violations of companylaw and deviations from reasonable criteria for effective governance. We show that ownership changes and the quality of governance are correlated.
JEL classification: P11, P21, O53, H70, H20.     

The sequencing of reform in transition economies

In this paper, we examine the consequences of sequencing on the progress of reforms in transition economies. The paper uses panel logit models to determine whether or not progress in some reforms enhances the prospects for other reforms. We find that progress on small-scale privatization is associated with advances in several other reforms, perhaps because small-scale privatization creates lobbies for reform. Our estimations suggest that a comprehensive program of small-scale privatization is needed to stimulate large-scale privatization, trade, and banking reform in a country that has undertaken little reform. Moreover, if restructuring is to occur banking reform is necessary. We also find that relaxing the fiscal constraint stimulates large-scale privatization, restructuring, and trade reform. Finally, we find that negotiations about EU accession negotiations advance the transition but only in banking reform and competition policy. Journal of Comparative Economics 33 (4) (2005) 835–850.     

Partial Privatization in a Differentiated Mixed Oligopoly

A model of differentiated mixed oligopoly is developed to systematically discuss the welfare consequences of partial privatization of a public firm. We analytically derive the optimal degree of partial privatization not only in the short run with restricted entry but also in the long run with free entry. It is shown that the short-run optimal policy is non-monotonic in the degree of love of variety, while the optimal degree of privatization is monotonically increasing in the consumer's preference for variety in the long run.      

The results of ‘mass privatization’in Romania: A first empirical study1

This paper provides an assessment of the contribution to privatization in Romania of the 1995-96 Mass Privatization Programme (MPP), which offered shares in nearly 5,000 companies to citizens in exchange for coupons. Analysing a comprehensive database of MPP companies, we find that an average of only 18.7 per cent of these companies' shares were actually transferred to Romanian citizens, and only 7.8 per cent of the companies were majority privatized (on a size-weighted basis). We estimate that the MPP accounted for only about 5.5 per cent of the value of state-owned enterprise assets inherited from the socialist period. The design of the programme created highly dispersed ownership structures, which is likely to generate particularly difficult problems in the many small companies in the programme. We place our findings in the context of the history of Romanian privatization policies since 1990, and provide some comparisons with mass privatization programmes in other countries. We also analyse the implications of the MPP for the corporate governance and the restructuring of enterprises.     

Optimal privatization of vertical public utilities

Abstract We examine restructuring, divestiture, and deregulation of a vertically integrated public utility, (e.g., electricity), from a public finance perspective. How an optimal restructuring plan for the utility depends on the cost of public funds and on the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, how the optimal degree of competition in the upstream and downstream segments are connected, and implications of privatization for consumer prices are examined. The higher the cost of public funds, the more likely the post‐privatization price will exceed the regulated public utility price. The greater the X‐efficiency gains from privatization, the more likely the post‐privatization price will fall.