Person: Hamm, Patrick
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Hamm
First Name
Patrick
Name
Hamm, Patrick
1 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Publication Mass Privatization, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in Post-Communist Countries(American Sociological Association, 2012) Hamm, Patrick; King, Lawrence; Stuckler, DavidWhy did the transition from socialism to capitalism result in improved growth in some countries and significant economic decline in others? Scholars have advanced three main arguments: (1) successful countries rapidly implemented neoliberal policies; (2) failures were not due to policies but to poor institutional environments; and (3) policies were counterproductive because they damaged the state. We present a state-centered theory and empirically demonstrate for the first time one of several possible mechanisms linking neoliberal policies to poor economic performance: mass privatization programs, where implemented, created a massive fiscal shock for post-communist governments, thereby undermining the development of private-sector governance institutions and severely exacerbating the transformational recession. We performed cross-national panel regressions for a sample of 25 post-communist countries between 1990 and 2000 and found that mass privatization programs negatively affected economic growth, state capacity, and property rights protection. We further tested these findings with firm-level data from a representative survey of managers in 3,550 companies operating in 24 post-communist countries. Within countries that implemented mass-privatized programs, newly privatized firms were substantially less likely to engage in industrial restructuring but considerably more likely to use barter and accumulate tax arrears than their state-owned counterparts.