A new data base on state-owned enterprises

Privatization of state-owned assets was a central economic reform of the 1980s and 1990s. Lack of data has made it impossible to judge the extent to which privatization has diminished the importance of state ownership in the economy or changed the performance of state-owned enterprises. This article introduces a new data base on state-owned enterprises, the first since the mid-1980s, which partly fills this information gap. The Bureaucrats in Business data base Provides time-series data for up to 88 countries on the shave of state enterprises in the overall economy, investment, employment, and internal and external credit as well as their overall surplus or deficit and the size of transfers to and from national treasuries. The article presents the: rationale for the data base, describes its seven measures of state enterprise size and performance, and explores possible uses of the information.