ABSTRACT
The main purpose of this chapter is to present evidence drawn from recent surveys in Russia in two areas-corporate governance and the new trade unions. The pivotal importance of issues concerning corporate governance has been stressed by many transition scholars (e.g., Aghion and Blanchard, 1994; Boycko et al., 1996). The theoretical issues raised concerning new forms of enterprise ownership and control are all the more salient because, unexpectedly, employee ownership has proven to be a widespread feature of the privatization process in several transition economies (Nuti, 1995). This development has been generally unwelcomed by most economists. Also during the last couple of years there have been some informative attempts both to describe (e.g., Blasi, 1995) as well as to assess the economic effects of new structures of ownership and control in Russia (e.g., some of the essays in Frydman, Gray and Rapaczyski, 1996). Equally, for diverse reasons including the rapid pace of change, it is clear that existing empirical work leaves many questions unresolved and that additional empirical work is needed.1 We make a modest step in that direction in the main part of this chapter, in which we draw on our survey data to report new findings for both privatized and non-privatized firms on the nature and effects of different structures of ownership and control. There does not appear to be much support for the claim that either stateowned firms or employee-owned firms are workercontrolled. Our findings suggest that in transition economies privatization does not produce fundamental changes in inherited patterns of corporate governance but rather has served to strengthen managerial control. There is no strong evidence that the key obstacle to enhanced performance is employee ownership.
