Privatisation in Central Europe: Different Legacies, Methods, and Outcomes

Privatisation and the redistribution of property rights are key features of the transformation of the economic and political space of Central Europe. Within this region there have been important national differences in the experiences of privatisation: in terms of the legacies of the state-socialist period, in the methods of privatisation, and in the outcomes in terms of property rights. We explore three major aspects of privatisation. First, we revisit the path-dependent nature of privatisation, as a process which is influenced above all by national economic and political structures, including relationships in and around the state. Second, we argue that with emphasis on path dependency there is a failure to give sufficient attention to the way in which there was a significant shift in course of transformation in the range of strategics available to the main agents in the privatisation process; in particular, a high degree of control over property rights was achieved in the ‘third wave’ of privatisation by a small number of agents in the context of weak reregulation and corporate governance. Third, we investigate the nature of the third wave of privatisation through the functioning of networks of firms in the Czech and the Slovak Republics.