Privatization and Economic Reform in Central Europe: The Changing Business Climate

The Process of economic restructuring is especially important and particularly complex in Central Europe, where Poland, Hungary, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Slovenia, and other independent states of former Yugoslavia, are struggling to transform themselves from socialist to market economies. Each country faces equally complex challenges, however, in creating a new business climate that will nourish domestic enterprise and attract investments by multinational corporations. These challenges include: privatising state-owned enterprises that have dominated the economies of socialist countries; developing public policies and programmes that support the private sector, especially small- and medium- scale enterprises; decentralising the state administrative structure to allow regional and local governments to play a more active role in providing public services and supporting private enterprise; and restructuring industry, agriculture, and services in order to diversify and reinvigorate the economic base (including infrastructure) or regions surrounding cities still dominated by heavy and largely obsolescent manufacturing industries. This book surveys the situation in Central Europe during the early period of transition in the early 1990s when governments in all four countries were experimenting with privatisation and economic reform. The authors assess how privatisation and economic reform policies have changed the business climate in this important region of the world. The editor provides an overview of economic reforms in Central European countries, offers a framework by which to compare them, describes the approaches to privatisation their governments adopted, and identifies the problems and challenges that each country faces in attempting to create a market-orientated economy.