ABSTRACT
A recurring pattern in the privatization experience of some East European economies has been the tendency to abandon principal reliance on traditional privatization through market sales and to move toward various modes of ‘mass privatization’. In such countries as Bulgaria and Poland, initial attempts at the traditional approach faltered against the background of inadequate local capital markets and the small size of the local savings base. The failure of the traditional approach in economies where a significant proportion of the economy’s assets are to be privatized illustrates a central point about the process of privatization.
