"An Essay on Methodology for Study of Privatization in the Transition Economics of Central and Eastern Europe: The Cases of Poland and Bulgaria"

Privatization has for a long time been a high-priority subject for policy-formulation and research in the developed countries, but only much more recently has it begun to attract equally keen interest in the former centrally-planned, socialist economies. The rising interest in privatization in the former CPEs has typically coincided, naturally, with the commencement of their Transition Economy stage, when they began to move toward heavier reliance on market mechanisms generally. Among Western economists, privatization has already long since assumed a central place as one of the key reform instrument facilitating achievement of several different, inter-related market-oriented liberal economic policy objectives. On the other hand, in Japan researchers and policy-makers have up to now tended to view privatization as being a result arising from the influence of a number of causation is reversed in their thinking. However, this point to a broader distinction, is that Japanese study reports on privatization tend to be abstract or theoretical, whereas Eurropean ones are much more practical. One should not over-stress this distinction between European and Japanese researchers, as it is in the nature of a nuance, but it certainly exists. Poland and Bulgaria are the objects of this study. From the first onset of their "transitional economy "phases, both of these countries have stressed privatization as one of their most urgent and important reform targets, yet both of them have progressed rather slowly toward achievement of their goals in this policy area. Nevertheless, privatization policies see destined to retain primacy among the many other micro- and macro-economic policies, as well as in the area of institution-building. This is so in large part because privatization has the intrinsic characteristic of directly influencing the material interests of the principal parties concerned, notably those of high officials in government and labor unions. This author, drawing on his experiences in first-hand observation of the actual facts of economic structural transformation in a number of different developing countries, is much inclined toward the view that success in privatization campaigns depends upon certain pre-conditions being achieved in the private sector. In this way, the government authorities are enables to take a favorable policy stance toward the private-sector activities beginning to replace, functions which formerly were the exclusive province of government agencies and state-owned enterprises. Hence, even when the privatization measures, narrowly defined, are executed inadequately due to the existence of some barriers, the efforts made toward their implementation may promote the government to more actively promote its liberalization policies in the political arena. At this initial stage of the research, without yet having embarked on systematic investigation of the intended study examples, nor having collected statistics data, this thesis is offered in the form of an essay on the orientation and methods of the empirical research to follow.departmental bulletin pape