Abstract
When nominal wage rigidity is large, and banking sector oligopolistic, the benevolent government may prefer to regulate interest rates to boost labor demand. A government of a transition economy may postpone bank privatization to keep credit provision under control, as long as inefficiencies of state ownership are not prohibitive.
We model a transition economy where the government initially owns enterprises as well as banks. The economy features constant wage, and strong market power of banks.
Under these conditions, we identify when the government has incentive to privatize enterprises and/or banks. We derive conditions under which the banking socialism (the government owns banks, but privatizes enterprises) dominates other institutional modes: socialism, industrial socialism, and capitalism.