Les entreprises d'État après le socialisme : pourquoi et comment les privatiser rapidement

In: Revue d'études comparatives est-ouest: RECEO, Band 26, Heft 2, S. 5-37

Abstract

State-owned enterprises after socialism : why, and how to privatize them rapidly.
The problem of privatization appears to be the most controversial problem of post-socialist transition. There is still much disagreement on how and how fast to privatize the great number of state-owned enterprises, and there are even arguments claiming that these entreprises should not be privatized at all. This disagreement is seen to be caused by the lack of a clear and generally recognized analytical argument why firms should be owned privately, which leaves this problem to arbitrary ideological preferences. The paper provides such an argument and shows what it implies for the speed and the method of post-socialist privatization. The argument is based on the author's earlier study of scarce economic competence and the efficiency of its allocation in society. The well-known problem of allocation of scarce managerial talents is shown to raise the twin problem of allocation of scarce competence for ownership. It is for an efficient solution of this problem, shown to be crucial for social efficiency, that private and tradeable ownership of firms proves indispensable. The implications for the speed and the method of post-socialist privatizations are that all the state-owned enterprises should be privatized as rapidly as possible, and that a suitable privatization method is the one by investment vouchers with free entry for investment funds and unrestrained secondary trading with shares. Compared to the usual incentive arguments, the competence argument brings stronger support to private and tradeable ownership of firms, but is more favorable to income redistribution and social security, provided that this concerns persons and not firms.