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Privatisation of the public services sector in Croatia and SEE: assessment of the major gains and pains

Funding
London School of Economics (LSE), UK - research grant

Timeframe
March 2010 - February 2011

Lead Researcher: Dr Nevenka Čučković

Project’s Summary
This research project aims to identify and assess key economic and social impacts of privatisation of Croatian public enterprises INA (oil and gas industry) and Croatian Telecom (telecommunications) on their management, corporate efficiency, quality of services delivery, prices; equity, investment and market competition.
In establishing these impacts, the research aims to determine major costs and benefits and shed some light on the general economic and social gains of privatization transactions in the public utilities sector in Croatia in comparison to the SEE experiences and the selected new EU member states.

Aims and objectives of the research
The main aim of the research project is to identify and assess the underlying economic and social impacts of privatisation of public utilities’ performance in energy and telecommunication sectors in Croatia as compared to benchmark practices in SEE and new EU members.
The specific research objectives are:

  • To contribute to the present policy debate on quality of performance of privatised public utilities linking it with improving competition in services delivery, but also not loosing sight of on consumer’s interests and potential adverse social effects.
  • To provide the comparative EU-8 and SEE regional perspective in identifying a sort of balance-sheet of privatisation costs and benefits and in evaluating their business performance and potential for regional cooperation;
  • To produce a policy relevant research pointing out to instructive experiences and best practices for improving service performance of companies in selected public utilities sectors, not only for Croatia, but also for the region of SEE;
  • To extract a number of relevant policy recommendations that could assist managerial teams of selected enterprises in dealing with crucial questions which shape their further market transformation.

Research Output
The expected output will be a research report based on the analysis of the experiences of privatisation and post-privatisation performance of two selected case studies of public services in Croatia. The research results will be placed into the comparative framework with the new EU member countries as well as with the region of SEE.