Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 May 2021

Abstract and Keywords

We replicate, update, and extend earlier work on manufacturing enterprise privatization and productivity in Russia. Our results suggest a more nuanced view of privatization than that previously offered. We confirm findings that the average impact on productivity of privatization to domestic owners is around –3 to –5 percent, though some regions show positive productivity gains of similar magnitude to those in Central Europe. The regional variation is positively associated with the size of the regional bureaucracy. Notwithstanding the average negative effect, our updated results show a pronounced change after 2002 as the productivity effects of Russian privatization have begun to approach those seen elsewhere much earlier. Privatization became most effective west of the Urals, in areas with greater market access. Initially an outlier, by 2005 Russia appeared to be becoming more of a normal country, at least in the narrow sense of the impact of private ownership on firm productivity.

Keywords: privatization, productivity, economic geography, state bureaucracy

J. David Brown

J. David Brown is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). He conducts research on privatization, productivity dynamics, and entrepreneurship.

John S. Earle

John S. Earle is a Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, and a Professor of Economics at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest, Hungary. His research interests include firm performance, productivity dynamics, and the consequences of restructuring for workers, as well as various topics in labor, transition, and development economics.

Scott Gelbach

Scott Gelbach is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development in the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. A specialist in Russia, his research interests center on the study of economic reform and other questions in political economy.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.