Abstract
This chapter* analyses the way transition economies have seen a rather quick rise in the share of their GDP coming from private firms. The polar cases of Poland and Romania are presented, with a neat preference, it should be admitted, in terms of information, for the first country. It is shown that, contrary to what common sense would suggest, it is not by a massive transfer of state-owned assets to private hands that the share of private ownership has risen. On the contrary, what appears at least in Poland is a real collapse of the state sector, whatever its destiny — that is remaining state or passing to private hands. What we have learned on another side from transition (at least in success stories) is that a brand new private sector of small-scale enterprises, mushrooming from scratch, is able to transform a country in a limited number of years. This will be seen in the three sections which follow. A first section recalls the initial debate about the methods of privatisation: should one be ‘radical’ and mass-privatise from above as quickly as possible, or should one be ‘organic’ and bank on the slow emergence of a class of genuine entrepreneurs able to transform the entire economy from the bottom? A second section shows in detail the overwhelming role of the new private sector in the privatisation process of the Polish economy.
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© 2003 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Duchêne, G., Rusin, P. (2003). New Private Sector and Growth — A Tale of Two Economies in Transition: Poland and Romania Compared. In: Kalyuzhnova, Y., Andreff, W. (eds) Privatisation and Structural Change in Transition Economies. Euro-Asian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378339_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378339_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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