Privatization And Corporate Governance: The Lessons From Securities Market Failure

Abstract

This paper analyzes the comparative experiences of Poland and the Czech Republic with voucher privatization. Because of a number of similarities between these two transitional economies, it finds their comparative experience to provide a useful natural experiment, with the critical distinguishing variable being their different approaches to regulatory controls. However, while their experiences have been very different, their substantive corporate law was very similar. The true locus of regulatory differences appears then to have been the area of securities market regulation, where their approaches differed dramatically.