. As a result, mass privatization techniques, resulting in full transfer of the interests sold, without special deals for insiders and without attaching lingering investment or employment obligations, should be the goal (Kaufmann 30). Like Hellman, Kaufmann and Segelbaum support mass privatization with an efficient political structure that promotes equality and combats corrupt business practices.These two articles overemphasize the need for mass privatization in the reform process. While they accurately articulate the need for more efficient political systems, they fail to emphasize the importance of initial conditions and to explain the mixed results from the first ten years of reform. The World Bank reports that there is little systematic research on the conditions that make particular methods of privatization more or less vulnerable to corruption (32). Black, Kraakman, and Tarassova examine how Russias mass privatization program facilitated corruption, and even identify problems that have occurred in Czechoslovakia, a country that has been relatively successful in implementing mass privatization. Black concludes that mass privatization is likely to lead to massive self-dealing by managers and controlling shareholders unless a country has a good infrastructure (1731). Without such infrastructure, Russia could not successfully implement rapid privatization, and even in Czecholslovakia, where initial results were promising, increasing tunneling in the late 90s has led to a recession. Moreover, partial reform has not always featured the excessive corruption that was predicted by many economists. Hungary and Poland have had relatively low levels of both state capture and administrative corruption, despite their gradualist reform programs. Yet this is not to say that all gradualist reform programs feature less corruption, but rather that the results from each country vary according to their individual situation and particular ine...
