Who gets privatised? An empirical analysis of Polish manufacturing

This paper employs a multinomial logit model to examine what determines the choice of a particular firm for a given privatisation method. A variety of hypotheses about possible determinants of ownership change are tested using an extensive data set for Polish manufacturing at the beginning of transition. The results at a firm as well as at a sector level give strong support to the hypothesis of the importance of resource constraints on the choice of ownership. Large firms with high financing requirement are more likely to be owned by outsiders. High sectoral capital intensity discourages small insider owned firms while high degree of product differentiation is a constraint for different investors, with the exception of outsiders. We also find that firm quality, measured by profitability and exporting outside the Soviet block, appeals to all types of investors but, additionally, privatisation offers outsiders ways of entering sectors with substantial entry barriers

The Impact of State and Foreign Ownership on Post-Transition Industrial Concentration: The Case of Polish Manufacturing

This paper reports an analysis of the determinants of the level and changes in Polish industrial concentration in the early post-transition era. The empirical evidence is based on a panel of 144 Polish manufacturing industries over the period 1989-1993. The results suggest that both state and foreign ownership have a significant impact on industry concentration and this relationship is U-shaped. Minimum efficient scale is found to be the only other factor to impact on industry concentration

Source Country Characteristics and the Inflow of Foreign Direct Investment into Saudi Arabia

The paper examines the impact of source country characteristics on the inflow of FDI into Saudi Arabia using a gravity-type model including economic, distance and socio-political variables. A unique database listing all new investments involving foreign ownership is used to construct a panel of 33 countries in the period 1980–2005. To account for many country–year observations with zero FDI, the negative binomial regression, the Tobit regression and the Heckman selection procedure are used. The conclusions drawn from the analysis employing panel-based techniques differ from the results obtained from pooled regression models. Also, the determinants of FDI differ depending on whether foreign investment is measured in terms of investment expenditure or the number of individual foreign projects. The Heckman selection results reveal that there are a large number of factors affecting the decision to invest in Saudi Arabia, compared with relatively few determinants of the actual size of investment. Traditional size and distance characteristics hold to a great extent but the relationship between FDI and bilateral trade is unclear and there is some evidence that the countries that export to Saudi Arabia do not invest there. In terms of scope for possible spillovers, there is mixed evidence on whether the investment comes from more technologically advanced economies but volume-wise important investments originate from countries characterised by high income per capita

Firm Turnover, Restructuring and Labour Productivity in Transition: The Case of Poland

This paper explores the impact of turnover and restructuring on labour productivity in the Polish economy over the period 1988-1993. Changes in aggregate productivity are decomposed into elements corresponding to productivity growth among survivors, market share growth by survivors and the contributions of entering and exiting firms. The traditional entry and exit effects begin to work as transition to a market economy progresses. However, initial productivity improvements are due to changes to market shares of the existing firms following the break-up of large enterprises. Regression analysis shows that changes in the firm-level productivity are affected by restructuring and a more competitive economic environment

Strategy Choices of Firms and Market Structure.

This paper suggests a new approach to the empirical analysis of market structure. Market concentration is an aspect of distribution of market shares of firms, and market shares are best modelled at the firm level, bringing into play strategy choices made by firms. It follows that a useful approach to explaining concentration would be a two stage one: to estimate firm size or market shares as a function of firm level determinants, and to use the information in these estimates to assess the relative contributions of firm characteristics to concentration. The method is illustrated by application to selected Polish manufacturing industries in the early transition period