What Happened to the National Road Carrier in a Post‐Communist Country? The Case of Poland's State Road Transport

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to seek to reconstruct the ownership transformation involving Poland's State Road Transport (PKS) companies passed through after 1990. Data collected from various sources (above all the Internet) were used to establish the degree of advancement of the transformation processes. Despite the passage of 18 years since the new economic reforms were launched, privatization processes are not well advanced. State ownership remains dominant, in the form of Treasury companies as well as state‐owned enterprises. Privatization processes have encompassed fewer than half of all firms, the most popular form taken (in about a quarter of all analysed cases) involving leasing by workers. This would seem of major interest, attesting as it does to the greater activity of some worker's teams, as well as the passive role of the state in privatization processes. A much smaller number of firms (26) have been purchased by external investors, the only important international concern among these being Veolia, which had taken control of 11 PKS companies as of mid‐2006. By and large, it is the firms carrying passengers or passenger and goods that are in a much better situation, as opposed to the companies that are commodity‐carriers only. The majority of the latter have collapsed, or have undergone the kind of privatization that involves simultaneous shutdown. Mixed passenger and goods carriers have had to reduce their level of activity in commodity transport.

Notes

1. In the official nomenclature PKS passenger carriage is called ‘inter‐settlement’, and is an equivalent of intercity, regional and local (as opposite to the urban local carriage being the domain of urban transport firms).

2. According to GUS's REGON database (2006), there are a total of 1405 non‐urban passenger transport companies, including 1177 employing fewer than ten. An absolute majority of the latter (1160) are small family or one‐person businesses having just one or two vehicles. The origin of the small businesses is connected with an owner's desire for independence and higher incomes than in a state company.

3. Freight road carriers are overall the least‐investigated segment of the road market in Poland (Skala‐Późniak, 2001).

4. All those existing and having homepages in mid‐2006. Please note, the number of PKS companies decreased from 233 (as of 1 July 1990) to 186 (mid‐2006). Companies are categorised according to the Polish legal system of ownership.