From the end of the Second World War, economic policies in several developing countries were deeply influenced by writings of Keynes and the concept of “effective demand”. The policy of Keynes emphasized a strong intervention of state to control economic and social activity. This interventionism provided foundations of the Welfare state which will develop in the post war period.
In the early eighties, because of relatively poor performances of the economy in these developing countries, international financial institutions proposed new regulations of the public action characterized by the neoliberalism. This new approach consisted to proceed to the privatization of nationalized enterprises to oblige them to play the hard game of competition.
The main aim of this study was to evaluate the impact of privatization on the microeconomic performance of Cameroonian public enterprises. More specifically, the study aimed to evaluate the impact of privatization on two important indicators of this performance: profitability and productivity.
The data were collected from ARSEL, CTR, INS and SNI. They were statistically analyzed using the software Excel 2010 and EVIEWS 7 and the test of Wilcoxon and the test of Student were used to test assumptions. The methodology consisted in a first stage to make a comparison of profitability and productivity ratios of eight public companies three years before and five years after their privatization, in order to determine the static effectiveness. In a second phase, we used the regression model “SUR”, in order to determine the dynamic effectiveness.
Thus, the static analysis showed that 100% of privatized companies of our sample improved significantly on average and in median their Return On Sales, Return On Assets, Return On Equity, Sales Per Employee and Income Per Employee. While the dynamic analysis showed that 62.5% of privatized companies improved significantly on average their Return On Sales, Return On Assets and Return On Equity ; 37.5% their Sales Per Employee and 75% their Income Per Employee.
Keywords: Privatization, performance, profitability, productivity, public enterprises, Cameroon.