In this study, we employ the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data collected in 2002, 2005, and 2009 for 21,499 firms from 27 Eastern European and Central Asian countries to examine firm-level growth constraints faced by privatized firms versus those faced by the originally (de novo) private...

Many Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, like Benin, have scaled up public investment during the last decade. Such a strategy contributed to the improvement of infrastructure, but also to a build-up of debt vulnerabilities. Looking forward, the planned fiscal consolidation will result in some...

This paper examines the extent to which firms in selected MENA countries reported being constrained by the business environment around the time of the Arab Spring and the extent to which these constraints affected their employment performance. The results suggest that small firms in MENA faced...

This paper focuses on the relationship between corporate governance and corporate performance by initial public offerings (IPOs) of Kazakhstan state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the transition economies of Central Asia. It argues that privatization (i.e., IPO) has different effects depending on...

Examining the implications of changes in public sector wage-setting arrangements due to privatization is a relatively new area of economics research, with few studies having analyzed the effects of public sector restructuring on relative wages in developed countries. There is, however, a growing...