Restructuring with What Success? A Case Study of Russian Firms

This case study of enterprise restructuring utilizes data collected from thirty-two former state-owned firms in Taganrog, Russia, in the summer and fall of 1999. These data are used to construct three composite measures of enterprise restructuring. When defined broadly to include several dimensions of the restructuring process, the “restructuring threshold” is achieved by half of the privatized firms participating in the project. The firms achieving this threshold are distributed across all industries included in the sample. Regardless of the composite measure used, more than one-third of the former state-owned firms participating in this project attained the “active” restructuring designation. The results indicate that (1) production assortment changes appear to be ongoing among those firms engaged in restructuring activities, (2) employment changes appear to involve a mixed strategy with regard to timely wage payments, workforce size, and the benefits package; and (3) outsider ownership is more prevalent among the group of firms designated as restructuring than among those firms that failed to achieve the “restructuring threshold.” To put into perspective the economic and business environment in which these former state-owned firms operate, a comparison is made to a group of de novo firms that were surveyed under the auspices of the same project. Comparative Economic Studies (2001) 43, 75–99; doi:10.1057/ces.2001.4