Privatization's impact on private productivity: the case of Brazilian iron ore

James Schmitz and Arilton Teixeira ()

No 337, Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: A major motivation for the wave of privatizations of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the last twenty years was a belief that privatization would increase economic efficiency. There are now many studies showing most privatizations achieved this goal. Our theme is that the productivity gains from privatization are much more general and widespread than has typically been recognized in this literature. In assessing the productivity gains from privatization, the literature has only examined the productivity gains accruing at the privatized SOEs. But privatization may have significant impact on the private producers that often exist side-by-side with SOEs. In this paper we show that this was indeed the case when Brazil privatized its SOEs in the iron ore industry. That is, after their privatization, the iron ore SOEs dramatically increased their labor productivity, but so did the private iron ore companies in the industry.

Keywords: Privatization; Iron industry and trade; Labor productivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2004
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lam
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (17)

Published in Review of Economic Dynamics

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/sr/sr337.pdf Full Text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Privatization's Impact on Private Productivity: The Case of Brazilian Iron Ore (2008)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedmsr:337

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Report from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kate Hansel ().