How to Privatize Successfully – Part II

How to Privatize Successfully – Part I

If privatisation needs to be done, it has to be done because it is the decisive step in transforming the economic system. Regarding foreign help Dr Klaus is very blunt: I think that the typical foreign help was sending would-be advisors and consultants. It became one of the most profitable businesses in the 1990s – to become a consultant and advisor in the transforming societies.

Their recommendations weren’t useful and not very good. You have had some experience with troubles in South East Asia in the second half of the 1990s – it seems to me that it has become an accepted truth that it was a tragic mistake of IMF policies for all of what happened in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere.
And, he goes

How to Privatize Successfully – Part I

Changing the economic system is not an easy task. And, of course, it is more complex when carried out half-heartedly. As privatisation is only a part of this process, it may not succeed if done in an isolated manner. It needs certain other changes and a competitive environment to bear fruit.
A case in point is Czechoslovakia. It provides us with a very good learning experience to see how after the fall of a collectivist state the gigantic task of changing the economic system was handled.
Presently, Dr Vaclav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic. He was Prime Minister from 1992 to 1997. Dr Klaus was one of the key members of a movement, Velvet Revolution, which overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia and one of the founders of the Czechoslovak Civic Forum Movement, the leading political organisation following the Velvet Revolution