Privatisation and state-building in the Western Balkans (original) (raw)
This paper reconstructs the main features of the privatisation programmes in Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Macedonia and sets them in the context of the broader economic and political transformations following the collapse of the socialist regimes and war, at the intersection between domestic and international pressures. It seeks to establish the profound political and economic implications of seemingly technical aspects of the process, for instance the choice of privatisation methods (employee-management buy-outs, mass privatisation through free distribution of vouchers, sale to domestic and foreign investors). Such choices are sometimes constrained by the broader economic environment -availability of investors, the size of enterprises and the structure of various sectors. In their timing, scope and implementation they also represent choices by governments, the political parties that lead them and international authorities (especially in Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina) that stem from calculations of self-interest specific to the political and economic fields of these countries and internationally. Thus, they reinforce and occasionally alter profound, underlying conditions that characterise the relationship between the economic and political fields in different national settings and the particular place of these national fields within regional and international contexts.
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