ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to assess and compare the significance of the quasi-statal method of privatization with the experience of other East European countries and its likely consequences in unified Germany. Advocates of the free market both inside Eastern European countries and in the West have dreamed for decades of a shift of power from states to private firms in the wake of the collapse of communist regimes. In Eastern Europe, the process of privatizing a communist economy has been compared to trying to turn fish soup into an aquarium of live fish—a process of change that is more easily accomplished in the opposite direction. The problems of reconciling collective property and privatization were finally placed in the hands of a Trust Agency for the People’s Propert. Fried-manesque economic preferences would militate against the adoption of a public super agency like the Treuhand, which to Eastern Europeans has overtones of the old state planning commissions.
