Impact of commercialization and privatization on the technical efficiency of Canadian state-owned enterprises

This study sets out to analyze the impact of privatization on the technical efficiency of some state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Canada. It also focuses on the changes that are undertaken, prior to the transfer of property, in a bid to commercialize the corporations. In Canada, the commercialization of public sector enterprises started in the mid-1980s and the reforms were pursued with the privatization of SOEs. This specific context can be used to assess the impact of commercialization on the performance of public corporations in the post-privatization era. The results obtained following the multivariate analysis show that commercialization and privatization have a positive and significant impact on the technical efficiency of SOEs. They also show that once the corporations are commercialized, the impact of privatization on their efficiency becomes insignificant.