State-Business Relations and Improvement of Corporate Governance

The corporate behavior of Russian firms has changed drastically in the last decade. In the beginning of this period, many experts reported the failure of institutional reforms (Stiglitz 1999), and many empirical studies confirmed this viewpoint. Therefore, a detailed study by Brown et al. (2006) based on data from 24,000 enterprises over the 1992–2002 period established that, while the Ukraine, Romania, and Hungary enjoyed increases in productivity, on the average, within a year of privatization, the effect of privatization in Russia was indeterminate even after five years. Russian companies systematically treated foreign investors with hostility and grossly violated shareholders’ rights, and the Russian government could not protect abused investors and shareholders by law (Kraakman et al. 2000). In comparison with Central and Eastern Europe, the inhabitants of Russia were more critical of the outcome of privatization and were widely supportive of the revision of its results (Denisova et al. 2007). The negative experience in Russia led to new conclusions about the importance of the institutional environment and the inefficiency of privatization under a weak government exposed to group interests (Perotti 2004).