Mass privatization in Central and East European countries: Implications for corporate governance

Mass privatization is one form of changing the property rights regime of formerly publicly‐owned means of production in the former peoples’ republics of Central and Eastern Europe. From an economic point of view, the central question at this transition is whether the change in property rights regimes significantly and benevolently affects the governing structure of the assets in question. This short essay attempts to provide a framework which is theoretical enough to guide meaningful questions, and open and naïve enough not to preclude relevant insight. The contribution of this article consists in a theoretically driven questionnaire which, based on the current state of the property rights theory of the firm, the relevant aspects of law and economics as well as financial economics, tries to elicit scholarly information about issues of institutional detail. Ultimately, the aim is to show how the different approaches to mass privatization can be evaluated from the point of view of creating viable governing structures.