and international publications.<sup>6</sup> Third, whenever possible we interviewed officials from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank who were directly associated with the privatization programs in different countries.<sup>7</sup> Finally, when necessary, we directly contacted the privatization offices or corresponding ministries (e.g., finance, industry) of each country to request specific pre-privatization information missing.<sup>8</sup> Whenever we found discrepancies we contacted again the national privatization agencies and the firms themselves to clarify the issues.9 We organized the questionnaire in four areas. The first area covered, preprivatization firm characteristics, and asked about sales, assets, profits, liabilities, management changes, and sector of origin. The second area covered pre-privatization labor characteristics and policies, and asked about number of blue and white collar workers, presence and incidence of unions, number of strikes, political affiliation of unions, labor restructuring measures and targets. The third area focused on the privatization process, and in particular, on privatization prices, transaction methods used, shares sold, and foreign participation. Finally, the fourth area included post-privatization labor re-hiring policies. We tried to get both dummy variables and exact number of workers for every possible category. However, we were not able to achieve this, as most respondents did not provide enough numerical information about the workers involved in various retrenchment and rehiring programs, so we settled for dummy variables that tell us if the policies were undertaken or not.'I Table 1 provides definitions of the specific variables that we collected.

Table 2 shows the results of our efforts to gather data. Out of the 400 cases targeted we ended up collecting data for 308 privatizations comprising 84 countries for the period 1982-2000. Of those, 16 are failed privatizations or operations in which preparation for privatization occurred but in which the sale ended up not materializing. As the table indicates, the complete information for our 308 firms accounts for 97.21 percent of total sales. On the other hand, 25 companies comprising about one percent of total sales supplied quite incomplete information that could not be further completed and thus, ended up not being used. Additionally, 26 firms did not respond to our requests, denied the existence of information, or simply refused to provide it. Twenty-two firms, accounting for 0.78 percent of total sales, could not be included since they were liquidated and no longer exist. Finally, nineteen firms could not be included in our sample as they merged 6. To do this, we mainly employed the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Oxford Analytica, and the Economist Intelligence Unit. We covered around 70.1 percent of the sample.

> 7. We also specifically selected firms totaling about 15 percent of the total sample and double or triplecheck most of the information.

8. Using this approach we covered 73.2 percent of the sample.

9. We found most discrepancies in developing countries, in particular Africa and the Middle East. Whenever data led to significant discrepancies that could not be reconciled the firms were eliminated from the sample. This occurred in 6 cases in total, 4 from Africa, 1 from the Middle East, 1 from Asia. These firms were classified under the category firms that supplied incomplete information in Table 2.

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