Economic growth is below what would be needed to resume rapid convergence to average OECD living standards. On-going efforts to improve the business climate are laudable, but need to be widened and strengthened. Much progress has been achieved in reducing red tape, but it is only recently that...

We investigate whether privatization, competitive forces, and hardening of budget constraints have yet begun to play efficiency-enhancing roles in Russia. The empirical work is based on information from a 1994 survey of privatized and state-owned Russian firms, together representing around 10...

In the 16 years since the OECD began conducting Economic Surveys of the Russian Federation, a great many policy recommendations relating to structural reform and framework conditions have been made. This paper, expanding on Annex 1.A1 in the 2011 OECD Economic Survey of the Russian Federation,...

This paper studies the impact of federal state shareholdings on the performance of Russian companies. It differs from most similar studies in two respects. Firstly, it focuses on mixed ownership companies rather than conventional state enterprises. Secondly, it distinguishes between several...

This study is dedicated to an important aspect of the long-run performance of firms, namely their survival under rapidly changing conditions in a transition economy. The analysis is focused on the question of whether privatization and ownership structure have affected the likelihood of...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

We propose three ideal types of business–state relations in a transition economy and explore the impact of government directors on corporate boards for firm behavior. Using a unique dataset of joint-stock companies in Russia, we find that the presence of government directors on corporate...

This paper estimates the effect of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four economies. We exploit the key longitudinal feature of our data to measure and control for pre-privatization...

We analyze the impact of privatization on multifactor productivity (MFP) using long panel data for nearly the universe of initially stateowned manufacturing firms in four economies. Controlling for firm and industry-year fixed effects and employing a wide variety of measurement approaches, we...

We estimate the effects of privatization on firm-level wages and employment in four transition economies. Applied to longitudinal data on manufacturing firms, our fixed effect and random trend models consistently fail to support workers' fears of job losses from privatization, and they never...