Off the Rails: Is State Ownership Bad for Productivity?

The performance of Indian railways in the nineteenth century provides a great context to study the effects of state ownership on productivity and other aspects of operations. We rely on a key feature of the institutional background whereby the Government of India purchased a majority ownership stake in private railways at predetermined dates set by contracts negotiated decades before the companies came under state ownership. Controlling for individual railway fixed effects, year fixed effects, and railway-specific time trends, we find no evidence of a decline in TFP following state takeovers of private companies. Instead of reducing productivity, as the recent experiences with privatization would suggest, we find that the Government of India maintained productivity when it became the owner of railways. Government ownership influenced certain areas of operations such as the capital-labor ratio, but not others such as fares. This suggests the state was able to achieve similar productivity without following the blueprint of private companies.