After decades of socialist rule under the Derg regime, the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) adopted market reforms including privatisation of state owned enterprises (SoEs) in 1991. This is a historic literature review, which traces the causes, scale, modalities and impact of the privatisation programme.
The literature on the early privatisation programme is sparse, covers different time periods and uses different sources of data from the Ethiopian Privatisation Agency and the World Bank as well as estimates based on econometric analysis of data from industry surveys. The literature provides details of the number of SoEs privatised in various sectors, but does not provide the names of the SoEs. The information on the impact of privatisation generally involves comparisons of the performance of privatised versus state owned firms.
