Privatization and Financial Market Development: A Comparison between MENA Countries and Other Regions

This paper examines the impact of privatization on stock market size and liquidity in a multinational sample of 31 emerging markets. We find that the intensity of privatization and the use of privatization offerings on the stock market contribute to enhance stock market development. To enable result comparisons across geographical regions, we re-run our GMM on our dynamic panel and find that results vary across-regions. Privatization was the most beneficial in the Asian sub sample where most favorable conditions were put in place before privatization actually started. In the MENA region however, similar positive outcomes are yet to materialize. We derive several policy implications from our results.