Corporate Governance and Privatisation: Lessons from Transition Economies

This paper brings the learning from a decade of privatisation activity in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe to the African economic policy debate. Privatisation has usually been found to have a beneficial impact on company performance in developed countries. However, it has been less successful in Central and Eastern Europe because of legal and institutional weaknesses and because mass privatisation techniques, though widely employed, were poorly conceived for delivering performance improvement in such an environment. Given some similarities between the Central and Eastern Europe and African institutional and economic environments, policy makers in Africa need to learn from this experience in order to ensure that privatisation is undertaken in a way that delivers effective ownership rights and in the context of a strongly competitive market environment. Copyright 2002 , Oxford University Press.