A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization interacting with market opening: privatization of a firm and privatization of its competitors. Under plausible conditions, the model implies that privatizing a firm is a substitute for exposing it to competitive markets, but privatizing its competitors is complementary. Our empirical analysis uses augmented 3-factor translog production functions estimated on 1992-99 panel data for 13,288 Russian manufacturing enterprises. We find that nonstate ownership of a firm reduces the marginal efficiency impact from product market dispersion, but the share of its competitors that are nonstate increases this marginal impact. Disaggregating nonstate ownership, we find that the shares of competitors in all three nonstate types are complementary with dispersed market structure, where the strongest complementarity involves foreign ownership. The evidence suggests that an important indirect impact of private ownership may be the intensification of market competition, and thus that competition only among state-owned enterprises may be ineffectual in stimulating them to increase efficiency.
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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number
2758.
Find related papers by JEL classification: L10 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - General L32 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Public Enterprises L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Boundaries of Public and Private Enterprise; Privatization; Contracting Out P23 - Economic Systems - - Socialist Systems and Transition Economies - - - Factor and Product Markets; Industry Studies; Population
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