Privatisation and the development of tourism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia: property rights, firm performance, and recombinant property

Privatisation is one of the key elements of the package of neoliberal reforms in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe which collectively constitute the 'sharp shock' strategy. In this, privatisation is ascribed the role of redistributing and clarifying property rights, which is an assumed precondition for efficiency improvements in individual firms. In practice, the transformation is characterised by path dependency, cultural and political legacies, and uneven and partial reform of market institutions and of regulation. We contribute to the debate on the link between property rights and firm-level performance in three main ways. First, we analyse the tourism sector as a counterbalance to the emphasis in the existing literature on manufacturing and financial services; particular emphasis is given to the roles of 'operators' and the 'nomenklatura', and to complex, nonlinear shifts in property rights. Second, we assess the performance of tourism firms created by different forms of creative and distributive privatisation; this emphasises the diversity of property rights, market segmentation, and the capital and debt structures of firms. Third, the value of the concept of 'recombinant' property for analysing the complex and changing forms of property rights is critiqued. These arguments are illustrated through a case study of tourism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.