Efficiency and Market Share in Hungarian Corporate SectorLászló Halpern () and Gabor Korosi No 333, William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross Business School Abstract: One of the major tasks facing a transition economy is to create the competitive environment of a properly functioning market economy. It is widely believed that competition has a positive effect on efficiency, but the theoretical and empirical support is quite scarce. The objective of this paper is to investigate the link between competition and efficiency for the Hungarian corporate sector during various phases of the transition process. We employ frontier production functions for exploring differences among groups of firms, and for identifying the typical adjustment process of each group separately throughout the transition period until 1997. Groups are defined according to industries, size, and ownership. The estimated production functions indicate a gradual improvement in efficiency and a shift from decreasing to increasing returns to scale due to a growing share of small firms entering higher returns regimes. Market share can be explained by the degree of internal and external competition and by the efficiency of the firm. Transitional recession in 1990-1 was followed by a fast consolidation period, with rapidly increasing firm level efficiency and improving returns to scale. This consolidation period ended in 1994-5, after that mean firm level efficiency only changed slowly. Massive investments largely increased the market share of the better performing firms and sectors, resulting in rapid economic growth. However, this economic growth may become vulnerable if productive efficiency fails to improve faster. Keywords: firm in transition economy; production functions; efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wdi:papers:2000-333 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross Business School |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
Swedish Business School at Örebro University.