In the three fast track, Central European transition countries, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, bank restructuring and privatization involved different approaches and met with a variety of outcomes. Hence, these experiences in otherwise similar transition economies provide important...

The privatization of Bank Slaski, one of nine regional commercial banks in Poland, illustrates the benefits of attracting a strategic foreign investor in the process. Internationale Nederlanden Group has contributed substantially to the upgrading of Bank Slaski's credit lending practices,...

Over the last decade, Hungary has experienced more foreign bank entry than any country in world, starting with foreign greenfield operations and then followed by the privatization of four of its largest banks to strategic foreign owners. Currently about two thirds of all banking assets in...

We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...

Chinese banks suffer from serious financial fragility manifested by high proportions of non-performing loans and low capital-adequacy ratios. A key policy introduced recently by the Chinese government to reduce financial risks is the establishment of four asset management companies (AMCs) for...

Two decades of policy lending created a large bad debt burden in the loan portfolios of the four large state-owned specialty banks that together dominate all aspects of banking in China. The government has recognized the need to restructure these insolvent banks by setting up bad debt agencies...

Based on insights from Joseph Berliner's work on innovation in the Soviet centrally planned economy and its reform variants, we analyze process innovation (technological development) and product development in restructuring Hungarian companies from 1992 to 1995. Using data from a survey...

In this paper, we take a detailed look at one Polish bank's experiences with financial sector reforms focusing on a bank-led enterprise-restructuring plan that linked directly bank privatization and recapitalization to bad-debt workouts. Based on personal interviews and original statistical...

To investigate the impact of bank privatization in transition countries, we take the largest banks in six relatively advanced countries, namely, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. Income and balance sheet characteristics are compared across four bank ownership...