At the core of studies on the post-communist transition economies is the privatization problem in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. There is a large literature on the effects of post-privatization ownership on firm performance. Their empirical results, however, are far from clear and confused to some extent due to the significant differences in specificities of transition countries/regions, estimation period, and other research constraints. In this paper, the authors conduct a systematic review of the relevant literature to assess various kinds of conclusions regarding the relationship between ownership structure and performance in privatized enterprises as a whole. We found that the effect size and statistical significance of foreign ownership greatly exceed those of the state and domestic private owners. We also found that the privatization method has a considerable impact on the effort level of corporate owners.
