Privatization and Financial Market Development in Emerging Countries

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of privatization on stock market size and liquidity in a multinational sample of 31 emerging markets. We find that the intensity of privatization and the use of privatization offerings (POs) on the stock market contribute to enhance stock market development, but the documented effects vary across geographical regions, owing to the specificities of the divestiture process. We use GMM procedure in order to estimate dynamic panel specifications and find that privatization appears to be the most beneficial in the Asian sub-sample where most favorable conditions were put in place before privatization actually started. In other regions, however, similar positive outcomes are yet to materialize. We derive several policy implications from our results.