State ownership and labor redundancy

To predict the number of workers who will lose their jobs if state-owned enterprises are privatized or restructured, several approaches have been taken: drawing on international experience, accepting estimates from current directors of state enterprises, and inferring the number of redundancies from ad hoc indicators of profitability, productivity, or labor cost. All three approaches may be irrelevant and inferior to systematically comparing employment levels across similar enterprises that differ in the share of capital owned by the state.