国有企业对资本和劳动价格扭曲的非对称影响

要素市场化的滞后是我国改革进程中的一个突出问题,要素价格的负向扭曲则是其重要表现.文章从国有企业的视角研究了要素价格扭曲的原因.一方面,金融抑制和所有制歧视使得国有企业以低于市场利率的价格获得了大量资本,加剧了资本价格的负向扭曲;另一方面,由于国有企业提供的社会保障、收入调节功能以及工会的作用会导致国有企业的劳动力价格高于非国有企业,反而有可能改善劳动力价格的负向扭曲.本文测算了171个三位数行业的资本价格扭曲和劳动力价格扭曲指数,通过实证研究发现,国有企业比重越高的行业资本价格扭曲越严重,但是劳动力价格扭曲越小.本研究具有重要的政策含义:虽然国有企业在提高劳动者收入上的作用值得肯定,但降低竞争性行业的国有企业比重、加快金融市场化改革、促进劳动力自由流动、减少政府对国有企业的补贴和保护,将有利于促进资源优化配置,提高社会的总福利水平.

Asymmetric Effect of State-owned Enterprises on Factor Price Distortion

The lag of factor market reform is a prominent problem in China's reform process,and the negative distortion of factor prices is an important performance. This paper studies the causes of factor price distortion from the perspective of state-owned enterprises. On the one hand,financial repression and owner-ship discrimination have caused state-owned enterprises to acquire a large amount of capital at below-market prices. It implies that,when the proportion of state-owned enterprises increases,the price of capital decreases, thereby intensifying negative distortion of capital price. On the other hand,state-owned enterprises have the ability and the incentives to pay higher wages to employees,possibly improving negative distortion of labor price instead. The first reason is that,because the state-owned enterprises take the multi-tasks,like maintain-ing social security and improving the income distribution,the governments provide the subsidies,protection and preferential policies for the SOEs in order to make up for their losses,thus making the SOEs face less competitive pressure. The second reason is governance structure of state-owned enterprises. In SOEs,the man-agers are more likely to form alliances with employees and pay higher wages to them. From this point of view,the SOEs may reduce the negative distortion in labor price.In order to test the hypotheses above,this paper first measures the distortion of capital price and labor price in 171 three-digit industries using C-D production function method and the China Industrial Enter-prise Database. The results show that,the prices of capital and labor are depressed in most of the indus-tries,and the distortion of capital price is more serious than labor price,and both the distortion of capital price and labor price has an upward tendency within the sample period from 1998 to 2007. Then we analyze the effect of state-owned enterprises on factor price distortion by using two-way fixed effect model.The regression results show that the impact of the proportion of state-owned enterprises on factor pricedistortion is asymmetric,that is,the higher the proportion of state-owned enterprises is,the more seriousnegative distortion of capital price is,but the negative distortion of labor price is smaller. Even after changingthe measurement of the proportion of SOEs,the results are still robust. In order to deal with the endogenousproblem,we choose the average age of firms within industries as the instrument variable for theproportion of state-owned enterprises,and the results are the same as the baseline regressions. As Hsiehand Klnow (2009) used 10% as the capital price,we calculate the distortion of capital price by using theirdata and repeat the OLS regression and IV regression,and the above results still exist.This paper has important policy implications. Although the role of state-owned enterprises in improvingthe income of laborers is worthy of recognition,it is still necessary to reduce the proportion of stateownedenterprises in competitive industries,as the negative effect of SOEs on the distortion of capitalprice is much bigger than the positive effect of SOEs on the distortion of labor price. And the other effectiveways to eliminate the distortion include deepening the reform of mixed ownership in SOEs,acceleratingthe reform of financial market,promoting free flow of labor,reducing government subsidies and protectionto state-owned enterprises,and expanding opening-up. Those will help to optimize the allocation ofresources to improve the overall welfare level of society.