L'impact des privatisations sur la performance des entreprises françaises

The budget deficits of numerous countries, the poor financial performance of nationalized firms and the recent developments of financial theory encourage many States to sell off their companies to the private sector. After a survey of recent privatization trends in the world and in France, as well as a presentation of the main theories in favour of privatization, this article presents the results of an empirical study on French privatizations. Over the 1986-2004 period, we find that privatization has a positive impact on the economic and financial performance of the firms in our sample. Performance is measured through different ratios:profitability, productivity, investment and financing.