ABSTRACT
The Treuhandanstalt is leaving behind a mixed legacy. On the one hand, its overall economic-policy objective of rapidly reducing the state sector’s share of production and employment in Eastern Germany has been achieved. Measured in terms of the book value of its capital resources, the agency privatized, reprivatized, or communalized sixty percent of the firms it held. At the Treuhandanstalt’s disclosure in the end of 1994 only some 66,000 of the 4.08 million persons originally employed there were still working for the Treuhandanstalt or the firms it held. The share of the Treuhandanstalt’s enterprises in overall employment in Eastern Germany has dropped from an original figure of 48 percent in 1990 to a figure of around one percent. On the other hand, the privatization process in Eastern Germany has been associated with an unparalleled reduction of production capacities and jobs: roughly one third of the firms concerned were shut down, and current estimates indicate that around three million of the four million jobs in firms held or formerly held by the Treuhandanstalt have been cut.
