ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses only commercialization, because of its greater impact on the Polish economy, and the special role the state has played in this process. It describes the economic and sociopolitical context of privatization in Poland, the legal framework of privatization, and results to date. The chapter examines the obstacles to commercialization, how the powers of government administrators compare with those of the firm's managers and supervisory board, who profits from or is benefitted by this kind of ownership, and who exercises political, economic, and social control over the commercialization process. It offers some observations on how the lack of an ownership interest in the development of the commercialized firms is responsible for many of the current failures of privatization. The chapter concludes that within commercialized firms, business has continued pretty much as it had when firms were directly controlled by the state, despite the apparently radical change of replacing employee self-management with autonomous management boards.
