State‐owned Enterprises,Inequality, and Political Ideology

State‐owned enterprises continue to play a considerable role in many economies. In this study we empirically investigate the connections between these enterprises and inequality as mediated through political ideology. Using cross‐country data on the relative size of the state‐owned enterprise sector, we find strong empirical support for an inverted U‐shaped relationship between its size and income inequality. We also find strong evidence that left‐wing (vis‐a‐vis right‐wing) governments are associated with a larger state‐owned enterprise sector in countries with higher inequality. This result is robust to using cross‐sectional vs. panel data, different identification strategies, and various controls.     

The impact of privatization on efficiency and profitability

Over the past three decades, China has undergone tremendous economic and social change as a consequence of the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy. This paper examines a key feature of this transition – the privatization of the state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) – through both a theoretical model and empirical analysis. Using newly collected primary data from a variety of sources, we study how privatization of listed SOEs affects employment, wages, profits and other aspects of economic performance at the firm level. Our major finding is that privatization results in substantial downsizing of employment, increased labour productivity and rising profitability.     

The impact of product market regulation on productivity through firm churning: Evidence from European countries

Productivity performance in European countries has been a policy concern for several decades. This paper shows that productivity can be enhanced by product market policies which, by increasing competition and efficiency, facilitate higher rates of firms’ entry and exit (i.e. firm churning). Drawing on annual country-sector data for the period 2000–2014 across the EU countries, we find that: (i) competition-enhancing regulation is associated with a higher rate of firm churning; (ii) firm churning, in turn, appears to be positively related to higher total factor productivity at the sector level by facilitating the entry of new competitive firms and the exit of less productive ones. Overall, we conclude that stringent product market regulation can be indirectly associated, via its impact on business dynamism, with the somewhat weak productivity performance in a number of EU countries. Thus, our results point towards substantial productivity gains that could follow from the introduction of further competition-enhancing measures in product markets.     

Industrial Ownership and Environmental Performance: Evidence from China

This study explores the differences in pollution control performance of industries with different types of ownership – State owned (SOE), collectively or community owned (COE), and privately owned (POE). A theoretic analysis is conducted and followed by an empirical assessment with Chinese data. The empirical results show that the COEs in China have better environmental performances in water pollution discharges than the SOEs and the POEs, suggesting that COEs may internalize environmental externalities.      

我国国有企业竞争中立制度框架及其改革路径*

国有企业竞争中立制度的构建是未来深化国有企业改革的必然方向。改革开放以来,中国国有企业一直坚持进行市场导向性改革,高度契合竞争中立宗旨与理念。本文系统梳理了改革开放以来国有企业市场导向性改革脉络,总结目前国有企业竞争中立改革面临的问题。在此基础上,本文构建了我国竞争中立制度框架的体制基础和具体构成。最后,本文提出从深化国有企业改革和扶持民营企业发展两方面来塑造中国国有企业竞争中立改革的制度框架,并根据九大制度安排构建了竞争中立制度改革的路径。现有研究多从法学和贸易视角质性分析竞争中立定义、原则内容和中国应对措施,尚未提出我国竞争中立改革的制度框架和实践路径,本文所建立的国有企业竞争中立制度框架与改革路径对建立中国特色的国有企业制度与社会主义市场经济体系具有一定借鉴意义。     

Changing China,Changing Africa: Future Contours of an Emerging Relationship

Current China–Africa relations have been statically framed: China invests in the continent and exports resources extracted by its state‐owned enterprises and fuelled by aid flows, while simultaneously undercutting African industry through cheap exports. We frame this debate, then explore how the framework could adjust in response to changing economic realities in China, centered on the “rebalancing” of the growth model toward domestic consumption. We argue that a new wave of private sector‐led, low‐cost manufacturers may find its way to selected African shores, in the process transforming those economies and the way in which China interacts with them, both for the better.     

Pre-entry experience,technological complementarities,and the survival of de-novo entrants. Evidence from the US telecommunications industry

We investigate the effect of pre-entry experience on firms’ performance in terms of survival. In particular we focus on entrants from a related upstream industry – semiconductors – into a downstream industry – telecommunications. We examine a sample of 336 de-novo start-ups in the US telecommunication industry and we estimate a discrete time hazard model of firm exit. Our findings show that, after controlling for both firms and founders’ characteristics, firms whose founders had prior experience in a related upstream industry such as semiconductors enjoy a relatively lower hazard of exit with respect to intra-industry spinoffs and other types of start-ups. Additionally, background heterogeneity of the founding team is an important determinant of survival for the firms in our sample. Our results point to the role of interdependences and technological complementarities between two vertically related industries in affecting the performance of new entrants.     

Institutional quality and new firm survival

The existing literature on firm survival focuses almost exclusively on firm‐ and industry‐level determinants. What is generally overlooked, albeit extremely important for firm survival in developing countries, is the impact of institutional quality. Using data from manufacturing firms in China for the 1998–2005 period, we find that institutional quality has a significant and positive impact on the survival of private enterprises. Specifically, a one‐standard‐deviation increase in the security of property rights protection leads to an 8.8 percent decrease in the hazard rate of private enterprises. Our results are robust to the inclusion of control variables and to various checks.     

关于进一步推进国有经济 改革发展的一些意见

改革开放以来,在我国国有经济的改革与发展取得巨大成就的同时,社会上流行着的一些错误观点：如国有企业低效率论、国有企业垄断论、国进民退论、国有企业退出竞争性领域论等,对坚持国有企业改革和发展的正确方向起了极其不良的干扰作用。本文在澄清这些错误观点的基础上,提出了一些对国有企业进一步改革发展思路的看法。     

Reforming state owned enterprises in China: Effects of WTO accession

In December 2001 China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). By signing the accession protocol, China not only agreed to reform its trade policy, but it also accepted regulations that implied reductions on government subsidies to the state-owned sector. In this paper we claim that the latter, largely ignored in the literature, generate important welfare gains that need to be attributed to WTO accession. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with state and private enterprises. We calibrate the model to the Chinese economy and we quantitatively assess the economic effects of reducing subsidies to the state sector as required by the WTO. We find the welfare benefits of such reduction in subsidies to be substantial. Using the context of China, this paper identifies a new channel through which WTO accession increases a country's welfare: it induces reforms on domestic subsidies which lead to an increase in economic efficiency.     

Firm ownership and internal labour practices in a transition economy

One feature common to many post‐socialist transition economies is a relatively compressed wage structure in the state‐owned sector. We conjecture that this compressed wage structure creates weak incentives for work effort and worker skill acquisition and thus presents adverse consequences for the entire transition economy if a substantial portion of the labour force works in the state sector. We explore firm wage incentives and worker training, as well as other labour practices and outcomes, in a transition setting with matched firm and worker data collected in one of the largest provinces of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh City. The Vietnamese state sector exhibits a compressed wage distribution in relation to privately owned firms with foreign ownership. State wage practices stress tenure over worker productivity and their wage policies result in flatter wage–experience profiles and lower returns to education. The state work force is in greater need of formal training, a need that is in part met through direct government financing. In spite of the opportunities for government financed training and at least partly due to inefficient worker incentives, state firms, by certain measures, exhibit lower levels of labour productivity. The private sector comparison group to state firms for all of these findings is foreign owned firms. The internal labour practices of foreign firms are more consistent with a view of profit‐maximizing firms operating with no political constraints. This is not the case for Vietnamese de novo private firms that exhibit much more idiosyncratic behaviour and whose labour practices are often indistinguishable from state firms. The exact reasons for this remain a topic of on‐going research yet we conjecture that various private sector constraints, including limited access to formal capital, play an important role.     

论体制转轨的动态过程——非国有部门的成长与国有部门的改革

本文试图将中国经济体制转轨所取得的成就和所面临的问题 ,放在一个简化了的动态模型中加以系统地分析。文章指出 ,动态地看 ,体制转轨的根本问题就是非国有经济比重的不断提高和经济的所有制结构的转变。在非国有经济的增长率高于国有经济的增长率的“基本假定”下 ,体制转轨的最重要的问题首先不是改革国有经济 ,而是发展非国有经济。这不仅是由于非国有经济的发展支撑着经济的增长和市场体制的形成 ,而且也是由于它创造出使国有经济得以改革的更有利的条件。国有经济改革的重要性主要在于 ,它们若不改革 ,就还要占用大量资源 ,而且是要从非国有经济转移资源作为事实上对国有经济的补贴。这种补贴在过去一个时期主要体现在银行坏债、资本市场上的“坏股”、非国有经济的“综合税赋”事实的不断提高 ,等等 ,现在也体现在政府债务增大。正因如此 ,尽管中国目前并不面临金融危机 ,但必须加快国有企业和国有银行控制的金融体制的改革进度 ,以保证非国有经济能持续发展下去 ,保证整个体制转轨过程的持续进行而不被某种危机所打断。     

Uncovering asset stripping during China's privatization

This paper empirically studies the occurrence and extent of asset stripping via undervaluing public assets during the mass privatization of state-owned and collectively owned enterprises in China. Using three waves of a national survey of private firms, we provide evidence that state-owned and collectively owned assets were substantially underpriced, indicating the presence of corruption during privatization. Further analysis shows that the extent of underpricing is more severe in regions with less market competition or weaker property rights protection, and more pronounced for intangible assets such as intellectual property rights and land use rights. When comparing firm efficiency between privatized firms and de novo private firms, we find that the former group continues to enjoy considerable preferential treatments, yet significantly underperforms the latter, possibly due to continued government control and intervention. Finally, we provide evidence that insider privatization is an important source of corruption during the privatization process.     

企业家出身造成了产能过剩吗*——来自中国企业—劳动力匹配调查（CEES）的经验证据

多年来,产能过剩一直是制约我国经济迈向高质量发展的重要障碍。与现有文献多从宏观产业政策层面研究上述问题有所不同,本文选取企业家公共部门出身这一微观视角,运用政治关联理论,就企业家出身造成我国企业产能过剩的微观机理进行了创新性的实证解释。运用“中国企业—劳动力匹配调查”（CEES）数据,本文的基准回归表明,为获取政治关联所带来的非市场回报,在其他因素既定的前提下,对于出身公共部门的企业家而言,其所在企业的产能过剩程度平均偏高139%,出现产能过剩问题的边际概率则平均偏高53%。内生性检验、中介效应模型的估计结果发现,与宏观产业政策相比,企业家公共部门出身对于产能过剩的影响效应具有更高的经济显著性,而过度投资则是其中的重要影响途径。运用上市公司的微观面板数据,同源性误差检验进一步支持了本文的主要实证 发现。为此,本文的政策建议是：政府应该将政策重心从产业政策转向竞争性政策,通过构建公平竞争的市场环境,厘清政府与市场二者的边界,避免企业家依靠政治关联对政府资源的“俘获”。只有构建公平竞争的市场经济秩序,企业家的创新潜能才能得到充分释放,并从微观机理上解决我国的产能过剩问题。     

银行业结构对中小企业融资的影响*

本文结合世界银行关于中国中小企业的调查数据和中国银监会发布的银行业分布数据,分析了银行业结构与中小企业融资的关系。本文发现：银行业结构与中小企业受到信贷配给的概率呈现“U型”关系,即存在最优水平的银行业集中度使中小企业受到信贷约束的概率最低。根据本文研究,我国银行业集中度总体上高于最优水平,但不同地区又有所差异。本文还发现,考察银行业集中度不能只关注国有大型商业银行比重的下降,大型股份制商业银行比重的替代性上升也没有有效解决中小企业融资难的问题。因此,鼓励发展中小金融机构,才是支持中小企业融资的有效途径。     

Family employees and absenteeism

Work effort varies greatly across employees, as evidenced by substantial differences in absence rates. Moreover, absenteeism causes sizeable output losses. Using data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP), this paper investigates absence behaviour of family employees, i.e. workers who are employed in enterprises owned by a relative. Our estimates indicate that being a family employee instead of a regular employee in the private sector significantly reduces both the probability and duration of absence to a substantial degree.     

Wage premium in the state sector and state‐owned enterprises: Econometric evidence from a transition country in times of austerity

This paper investigates the differences in the wage premium and compliance with the wage cut introduced in Serbia at the end of 2014, between two subsectors of the public sector: the state sector and state‐owned enterprises. Results show that before the austerity measures were introduced, the conditional wage premium was, on average, higher in state‐owned enterprises than in the state sector, with significant differences from the median to the top of the wage distribution. After the austerity measures were introduced, the wage differences between the subsectors deepened, due to lower compliance of state‐owned enterprises with the wage cut.     

Male–female wage discrimination in Chinese industryInvestigation using firm‐level data1

We use firm‐level data to analyze male–female wage discrimination in China's industry. We find that there is a significant negative association between wages and the share of female workers in a firm's labour force. However, we also find that the marginal productivity of female workers is significantly lower than that of male workers. Comparing wage gaps and productivity gaps between men and women, we notice an intriguing contrast between state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) and private firms. The wage gap is smaller than the productivity gap in SOEs, while the converse is true for private firms. These results suggest that women in the state sector receive wage premiums, whereas women in the private sector face wage discrimination.     

产业政策视角下的国有企业分类改革与政策调整*

本文从产业发展政策和自然垄断领域的规制政策两个角度,分析了国有企业在产业政策实施中的积极意义,探讨了目前产业政策所存在的问题,并提出了相应的政策建议。研究表明,国有企业在保证产业发展战略的实现和对自然垄断产业的规制中具有积极作用;在产业发展战略的实施中,应慎重把握行政性干预和市场机制之间的平衡,实现政企分开,侧重于创造鼓励创新的制度环境;在自然垄断行业中,应区分竞争性环节和自然垄断环节,并侧重于通过机制设计和价格管制限制自然垄断环节的市场势力。     

From central planning towards a market economy: The role of ownership and competition in Vietnamese firms’ productivity

This paper examines the role of ownership and market competition in Vietnamese firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) from 2001 to 2011. Making use of a large panel dataset of manufacturing firms, we find that, on average, both foreign-owned enterprises (FOEs) and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have performed better than privately owned enterprises (POEs) in terms of their TFP levels. However, while FOEs’ TFP ranked the highest in the period 2001–2006, SOEs “closed the gap” in the period 2007–2011. Moreover, we find that market competition has been effective in enhancing average firm productivity and in reducing the gaps in efficiency across ownership types. SOEs’ remarkable performance may be linked to several concurrent factors experienced during the period 2001–2011, namely, the process of restructuring the state sector during the 2000s, the increased economic integration due to the country's accession to the World Trade Organization (2007) and, finally, the preferential access to financial capital and land granted to SOEs. While some evidence supports SOEs’ equitization as an explanation for their remarkable productivity performance, WTO accession and cheaper access to inputs do not fully explain it.