This paper investigates the existence of ownership effects in the global oil and gas industry, i.e. whether there are systematic performance and efficiency differentials between National Oil Companies (NOCs) and privately-owned International Oil Companies (IOCs). The dataset, which is based on a survey published by Energy Intelligence and covers 1,001 firm observation years in the period 1987 to 2006, provides a unique corporate perspective on the industry's development. After summarising the main trends emerging from the data and discussing some key issues of comparing 'State Oil' and 'Private Oil', I find that non-OPEC NOCs underperform their private sector counterparts in terms of labour and capital efficiency, revenue generation and profitability. I also find that much of these differences could be bridged through a change in ownership. OPEC producers show higher efficiency metrics than the private sector, which might be related to exogenous asset quality. All NOCs produce a significantly lower annual percentage of their upstream reserves, but this cannot serve as an indicator of efficiency. This paper complements the time-series analysis of oil privatisations in Wolf and Pollitt (2008) and suggests that a political preference for State Oil usually comes at an economic cost.
This study empirically investigates the impact of privatisation on firm performance in the global oil and gas industry, where questions of resource control have regained widespread attention. Using a dataset of 60 public share offerings by 28 National Oil Companies it is shown that privatisation is associated with comprehensive and sustained improvements in performance and efficiency. Over the seven-year period around the initial privatisation offering, return on sales increases by 3.6 percentage points, total output by 40%, capital expenditure by 47%, and employment intensity drops by 35%. Many of our observed performance improvements are already realised in anticipation of the initial privatisation date, accrue over time, and level off after the initial ownership change rather than accelerate. Details of residual government ownership, control transfer, and size and timing of follow-on offerings provide limited incremental explanatory power for firm performance, except for employment intensity. Based on these results partial privatisations in the oil sector might be seen to capture a significant part of the performance improvement associated with private capital markets without the selling government having to cede majority control.
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