Transition on the Shop Floor - The Restructuring of a Weaving Mill, Hungary 1988-97

János Köll? ()
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Janos Köllő ()

William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Abstract: While a variety of studies analysed the benign effects of privatisation on firm performance under post-socialist transition using financial data very little is known about how the apparent productivity gains were achieved. This paper follows a weaving mill from 1998 to 1997 on its way of becoming a capitalist enterprise and gives a detailed account of the sources and limits of productivity growth. The data suggests that the factory was not far from the competitive optimum given the size of ‘plant and equipment’ - efficiency gains were mostly achieved by plant size reduction and asset stripping. The gains from this sort of initial restructuring helped many former state enterprises stay on the market but they did not necessarily indicate high levels of adaptability, capacity to innovate and ability to attract outside investors. In economies with many `seemingly restructured` privatised enterprises the elimination of the former state sector jobs is likely to continue within the private sector. The process may last for years after privatisation as a legal act had been fully accomplished.

Keywords: firm behaviour; firm objectives; compensation; transition; Hungary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 J31 L2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 33 pages
Date: 2004-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp645.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp645.pdf [302 Found]--> https://wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp645.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Transition on the Shop Floor - The Restructuring of a Weaving Mill, Hungary 1988-97 (2003)
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:wdi:papers:2004-645

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan 724 E. University Ave, Wyly Hall 1st Flr, Ann Arbor MI 48109. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WDI ().