Privatisation of State Owned Enterprises in Ethiopia since 1991

This historic literature review, which traces the causes, scale, modalities and impact of the privatisation programme is an attempt to answer the following questions: What State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) or sectors were privatised in Ethiopia during the 1990s? What were the reasons for privatisation and the impact of privatisation for the SOEs or sectors?

The literature on the early privatisation programme is sparse, covers different time periods and uses different sources of data from the Ethiopian Privatisation Agency and the World Bank as well as estimates based on econometric analysis of data from industry surveys. The literature provides details of the number of SOEs privatised in various sectors but does not provide the names of the SOEs. The information on the impact of privatisation generally involves comparisons of the performance of privatised versus state owned firms.