Finanzwissenschaftliche Diskussionsbeiträge / Specials series S: Industrial and social policies in countries in transition
URN urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-series-139
Herausgegeben von
Universität Potsdam, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Lehrstuhl für Finanzwissenschaft
Herausgegeben von
Universität Potsdam, Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakultät, Lehrstuhl für Finanzwissenschaft
5
The paper describes three stages of the privatisation process in Bulgaria 1990-1997. In the first period (1990-1993) progress was very slow. Only after 1993 a significant privatisation started. Mainly retail shops, restaurants and small businesses of various kinds were sold. In 1996 a programme for mass-privatisation was launched which has led to a widespread share-ownership in Bulgaria.
4
All countries of Central and Eastern Europe had to bear and are still bearing tremendous costs of the economic and political transformation. This paper deals with the case of Bulgaria. We describe the social situation and the most important social security institutions in Bulgaria (unemployment benefits, the pension system and family support) over the period of the last seven years.
14
After promising beginnings towards transformation, in 1991 the Bulgarian economy fell into deep crisis in the period from 1995 to 1997. Social policy, already overstrained due to the demands of transition, was unable to cope effectively with the rapidly spreading state of emergency. The following essay analyses the development of the social indicators and instruments of social security in the years 1990 to 1998. In addition to unemployment and unemployment insurance, the issue of pensions and poverty will also be examined.
16
Privatisation in Central and Eastern Europe can be defined as the transfer of property rights from the State to private owners. The transfers are carried out so as to vest the new private owners with the full property rights of use and disposal over their property, these rights being guaranteed by the legal framework established by the rule of law. In Bulgaria, one can distinguish between three main stages in the process of privatisation. Each was shaped by the conflicting resolutions of frequently changing governments and meant to serve different political goals. The first stage (1990-1993) is characterised by the blockade of legal privatisation, as ‘spontaneous privatisation’ was accorded high priority. As in other former socialist countries, great emphasis was placed on the so-called commercialisation of state-owned enterprises. This did not involve the actual transfer of State property into private hands, but rather the independent transformation of state-owned enterprises into joint-stock companies, as well as the establishment of subsidiary companies.1 The goals of introducing more efficient structures and applying modern methods of production by transferring property to a more suitable management were not achieved. The second stage (1993-1995) is a cash privatisation, which laid the foundation for an employee/management buy-out, aided by the legal provisions granting concessions in the payment of instalments. The most important factor in the third stage of the process of privatisation in Bulgaria was the adoption of the mass privatisation model as an alternative method of procedure. In 1996, legal regulations for mass privatisation were introduced and a privatisation fund was established. In the meantime, the process has evolved into its fourth stage, during which a strategy of privatisation has been formulated under the supervision of a monetary council, and various agreements with the IMF and the World Bank are being adhered to. Privatisation is the decisive factor in the structural reforms of East European countries. The problem of converting State property into more effective forms of property management has been exacerbated by the additional demand of carrying out the far-reaching structural changes as swiftly as possible. The expectation that a large part of State property would be privatised within a short time in Bulgaria, has not been met for a number of reasons. When the reforms began, the private sector was too weakly developed to become a catalyst for structural changes. Until 1995 there were no laws regulating the stock exchange or securities and bonds - the capital market was practically non-existent. Moreover, the various political parties could not agree upon the various models and objectives of privatisation. The population itself had no capital. The restitution of private ownership which will not be discussed in further detail was limited to the smallest businesses, traders and workshops. Furthermore, the Privatisation Agency and State authorities employed to initiate the privatisation process lacked experience. Another problem hindering privatisation was that the laws passed lacked precision and were constantly subject to change.
6
12
Industrial policy and social strategy at the corporate level in Poland : questionnaire results
(1999)
This paper presents results from a survey of industrial policy of the state and the social security system at the corporate level in Poland. Previous reports in this area indicated preferable directions of research to be taken in order to prove various hypotheses of the purposefulness of an integral approach to industrial policy and social security in the analysis of economic processes in transition (see Weikard 1997). This paper summarises the results and draws conclusions from a questionnaire study on subsidies, social benefits and economic policy in Polish firms during the process of transformation. Our results and conclusions show the scope and character of the processes in the area of industrial and social policy in the period 1994 to 1997. The paper is divided into five parts. The first part concerns the aims and methodology of the questionnaire; it also gives a brief description of the sample. The second part shows how enterprises dealt with the issues of employment and wages in this period. The third part characterises industrial policy at the corporate level, while the next presents results from the survey of various social schemes pursued. The final part aims at an integral approach in the analysis of various processes taking place in Polish enterprises. The survey was conducted in the period April to June 1998. Its aim was to observe certain phenomena occurring at the corporate level. The questionnaire was distributed among the managers, directors and presidents of large-size enterprises, which had been selected to satisfy the following three criteria. Firstly, the number of employees had to be considerable (over 300 workers). This criterion was applied following the consideration that certain social phenomena are more conspicuous in enterprises with large manpower. Secondly, only operating enterprises were selected, the enterprises which closed down were disregarded. Finally, for the purposes of the survey the units differed as regards their legal situation and form of ownership. Out of over 1800 enterprises 370 units were drawn where we sent the questionnaire. Unfortunately, as many as 51.9% of the respondents refused co-operation, questions to a certain extent puts the representativeness of the sample in question. Finally, 178 questionnaires were subsequently completed and returned for analysis. However, not all of these questionnaires included full answers to all of the 75 questions; therefore, while discussing the results of the survey we have indicated the number of relevant answers we have received.
19
New survey data for a panel of Polish firms is used to estimate employment and wage adjustments under various forms of ownership (insider vs. outsider) and asymmetric response to exogenous shocks. In contrast to earlier studies, dynamic panel data estimators (GMM) allow for endogeneity of observed variables and partial adjustment to shocks. Results differ from other findings in the transition literature: wages have little effect on dynamic labor demand and the firm-size wage effect is confirmed. Firms that expand employment have to pay significantly larger wage increases and rising sales add little to employment, suggesting labor hoarding. Dec1ining sales, however, significantly reduce employment and privatization (or anticipation thereof) has the expected benefits.
17
Privatisation and ownership : the impact on firms in transition survey evidence from Bulgaria
(1999)
Previous papers in this Special Series, have described in detail the theoretical background and development patterns, along with some empirical results, for the privatisation processes in Bulgaria and Poland. A range of issues have been raised which demand closer empirical investigation. For this purpose, the research group has developed questionnaire studies for Bulgaria and Poland. In Bulgaria, the National Statistical Institute (NSI) carried out the case studies between February and April 1998. The problems of the questionnaire set-up were identified in apre-test study, but unlike the Polish case, they led to only minor differentiation. Since financial limitations prevented a larger sample size, a sample size of 61 mid-sized and large Bulgarian enterprises was selected. Failure to respond was not a serious problem, unlike with the Polish questionnaire; this is because the NSI has maintained good links to the enterprise sector and management were prepared to give detailed answers, even on questions of their firms' financial status. However, as the Polish experience suggests, it has become obvious that the privatisation process is also associated with management's increasing reluctance to answer comparatively 'intimate' questions. Thus, future questionnaire studies must take a much higher rate of refusals into consideration. The pre-selection procedure in Bulgaria was determined by the project target, which sought to analyse the effects of the privatisation process on firm' s behaviour during the transition process, and hence only firms which had already existed before the changes were included. For small and medium-size enterprises (SME's), most of which were founded after the changes, partly due to the legal processes of spontaneous privatisation, some empirical, as weIl as analytical, studies were carried out. Thus, the research group limited the scope of investigation to enterprises with more than 250 employees. The underlying hypothesis is that employment problems are concentrated in larger firms, in particular amongst those still (partly) state owned. Because of the former ownership structures and relatively slower capacity for management change, the assumption is that state-owned enterprises (SOE's) which have only been recently privatised might still have traditional links to government even after privatisation. On the one hand, the SME's are obviously more prone to, and linked with, market processes. As a result, they don't have the financial potential and incentives to follow job-hoarding strategies. On the other hand, there are almost no SME's which are still stateowned. Hence, the prevailing opinion in the literature is that 'larger industrial firms were apt to be least efficient, most often producing inadequate and non-competitive products, with a high degree ofunder-utilisation oflabour and most inflexible to change' (lones & Nikolov 1997, p. 252). Thus, as mentioned above, though there may be some limitations with regard to firm representation, our sample characterises a number of enterprises that offer fertile ground for the analysis of firms' adjustment to the newly established market realities in a transition economy. Our study is unique in the sense that existing empirical studies on privatisation and enterprise restructuring generally cover the time period just before and after the initial stages of transition, e.g. 1988/89 to 1992. In those studies, samples of firms in the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria recognise that behavioural adaptations at the enterprise level had taken place just before the actual privatisation process materialised. Therefore, almost all of the firms under examination were still state-owned. The firms were usually divided according to their performance as 'good', 'average' and 'bad' enterprises. The main findings of those early studies have shown that the macroeconomic adaptations (i.e., macro-level changes which induced micro-level adjustment by the firms), as well as emerging market structures, have created enormous pressures which in turn have influenced firms' economic behaviour, reallocation of resources and consequent restructuring. This evidence supports the hypothesis that the SOE's started restructuring and adjusting their behaviour and performance, in response to the harsh realities of more open markets, before privatisation actually started. In this paper, we seek to present some results on these developments in Bulgaria, at the later stages of transition and privatisation (1992-1996). The aim of our questionnaire study is therefore to show the effects of the privatisation process and ownership on the behavioural adaptations of firms which had once been state-owned or continue to be owned by the state. The period under investigation is 1992 to 1996. For 1990 and 1991, the number of missing values is reactively high and, where relevant, we partly exclude these observations from our analysis. The paper contains seven sections. Section 11 outlines the macroeconomic environment in which our sample firms operate, provides some specifics of the Bulgarian privatisation process, and discusses data quality. Section 111 concentrates on the analysis of privatisation, the specific forms of ownership that resulted from it, and firm size. In Section IV, we describe the trends of the main economic variables within firms (such as employment, wages, labour productivity, etc), and a number of proxies of firm viability, while Section V presents some regression results to corroborate the discussion of the previous section. Section VI gives an overview of survey results of the impact of enterprise determined wage policy, trade union activity and membership, government control, and social benefits on enterprise restructuring. Section VII is a summary of our findings.
18
In socialist economies firms have provided various social benefits, like child care, health care, food subsidies, housing etc. Using panel data from Bulgarian and Polish firms, this paper attempts to explain firm-specific provision of social benefits in the process of transition. We investigate empirically with the help of qualitative response models, how ownership type and structure, firm size, profitability, change in management, foreign direct investment, wage and employment policies, union involvement and employee power have impacted the state of non-wage benefits provision.
11
Infolge der Veränderungen der politischen, wirtschaftlichen und rechtlichen Rahmenbedingungen hat sich in der ostdeutschen Landwirtschaft ein erheblicher Strukturwandel vollzogen. Zwar ist die Zahl der landwirtschaftlichen Unternehmen infolge von Neugründungen, Teilungen und Auslagerungen von Tätigkeitsbereichen kontinuierlich gestiegen, die Zahl der Beschäftigten in der Landwirtschaft ist dagegen drastisch zurückgegangen. In Brandenburg, der Untersuchungsregion dieser Studie, verringerte sich beispielsweise die Zahl der Beschäftigten von 39.035 Arbeitskrafteinheiten (AK-Einheiten) auf 25.991 im Zeitraum von 1992 bis 1997. Dies entspricht einem Rückgang von 33,4 %. Statistische Erhebungen aus dem Jahr 1997 zeigen, daß 31% der ehemals in der Landwirtschaft Beschäftigten in den Vorruhestand entlassen wurden, etwa weitere 20% befanden sich in Fortbildungs-, Umschulungs- oder Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen (MELF, 1997). Vielen Beschäftigten, die zwischenzeitlich in Arbeitsbeschaffungsmaßnahmen eingebunden waren, blieb nach dem Auslaufen dieser Projekte der Weg in die Arbeitslosigkeit nicht erspart (BALMANN et al., 1996). Etwa 40% der Bevölkerung Brandenburgs lebt in ländlichen Gebieten, und 4,1% aller Erwerbstätigen bietet die Landwirtschaft einen Arbeitsplatz, womit Brandenburg über dem Bundesdurchschnitt liegt. Bei einer Arbeitslosenquote von 20,2% (März 1998), gewinnt der Anteil in der Landwirtschaft beschäftigter Personen zusätzlich an Bedeutung. Vor diesem sozialen und demografischen Hintergrund ist die vorliegende Untersuchung einzuordnen. Es soll der Versuch unternommen werden, die Arbeitsmarktentwicklungen im Agrarbereich detaillierter zu beschreiben und ihre Bestimmungsgründe aufzuzeigen. Dazu ist es insbesondere notwendig, die Entwicklung des Arbeitskräftebestandes der landwirtschaftlichen Unternehmen in der Umstrukturierungsphase nach Rechts- und Betriebsformen differenziert zu betrachten. Das Papier gliedert sich in zwei Hauptabschnitte. In Abschnitt 2 erfolgt eine Beschreibung der internen Umstrukturierungsprozesse von insgesamt 75 Agrarbetrieben in Brandenburg zwischen 1990 und 1996. Dabei erfolgt eine Einschränkung auf juristische Personen, da diese infolge ihrer hohen Bedeutung im Hinblick auf die Zahl der Beschäftigten sowie die Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten der Anpassung von besonderem Interesse sind. Abschnitt 3 untersucht, wie die vollzogene Entwicklung unter Effizienzgesichtspunkten zu beurteilen ist.