The wave of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s increased productivity of many previously state owned enterprises (SOEs). However, governments often do not have sufficient support to privatize SOEs. We provide evidence that threatening privatization and market competition (entry of new firms)...

In the beginning of the eighties the Brazilian growth rate of per capita GDP fell abruptly. In this paper we ask if this fall can be ex-plained by the behavior of technological progress (measured by Total Factor Productivity or TFP). Our main conclusion is that the behavior of TFP can fairly...