The Effect of Privatisation on the Economic Performance of Firms

Book excerpt: This paper provides an evaluation of the effects of privatisation on the efficiency of firms in the case of large Spanish State-Owned Enterprises that had been privatised from 1990 onward. The firms' efficiency is approached here by economic performance indicators, through acknowledging their shortcomings but also taking profit from their, some time neglected, advantages. Unlike other research work that compares pre-post privatisation performance, we make use here of usual economic-performance indicators, though taking into account their hierarchical relationship; take as privatisation moment the point at which control over the firm actually passes from the government to private investors; and work on companies' base data, which allows us to obtain performance measures more accurate by excluding all extraordinary and non-operating financial flows. The comparative analysis carried out yields mixed results; most of the evidence points toward the conclusion that the firms' economic performance did not actually improve after privatisation, the only clear exception being one of the six cases studied here.