Abstract
Transfers of public assets to private owners in various economic sectors have been recognized as one of the primary sources of economic change according to liberal and institutional perspectives. Proponents of institutional economics have argued that post-communist privatizations were not symmetrical to communist nationalizations and that for this reason it was not possible to conceptualize economic reforms in terms of the big bang claimed by liberals.
Adherents of institutional economics have argued that post-communist trransformations should be seen through the perspective of formal rules and informal constraints: while formal rules could be changed relatively quickly by political mechanisms, informal rules have been rooted in social habits and routines and they cannot be changed very quickly due to ther "path dependency tendencies". Put in another way, according to the institutional perspective, property is not considered to be a set of rights and duties resulting from "invisible hand of the market", but it is explained through the perspective of a mutual configuration between property rights and informal social habits.
The article reviews the institutional conceptualization of early post-communist property changes to provide a framework for the adoption of more differentiated and more current models for the elucidation of interdependence between curretnly ongoing privatization processes and management practices.