برآورد دوباره از بهره وری عوامل کل شرکت ها در صنعت آهن و فولاد چین

Using the firm-level census data, this paper re-estimated the total factor productivity (TFP) of firms in China's iron and steel industry and examined its potential determinants over the period 1998–2007. To deal with the “endogenous input” problem, we used the semi-parametric regression techniques for estimating the firm-level TFP. The results suggest that firms' TFP in China's iron and steel industry has been steadily increasing over time with the key drivers of productivity improvement differing substantially between firms with different characteristics including their size, ownership type and geographical location. Notably, the productivity of small firms is positively related to market share and negatively related to R&D. Large state-owned enterprises' productivity is relatively insensitive to changes in market share and R&D, while the non-state owned enterprises are more likely to obtain their productivity gains through export. Increasing firm size is generally positively correlated to firms' performance in TFP, and it is more so in the less developed Western than the Eastern and Central regions. The findings suggest that different policy instruments targeting firms with different characteristics in the process of restructuring the industry may be desirable.

The rapid expansion of China's iron and steel industry (hereafter “the industry”) since the early 21st century has been remarkable in terms of both the speed and scale of its development. Yet there is an issue regarding the “quality” of the industry's expansion as to whether the rapid growth was driven primarily by increases in inputs or gains in productivity. There is no consensus as to which factors have been more important for driving the ongoing wave of the industrial expansion which underscores the current resource boom. However, a more sustainable and healthy development of the industry should be based on continuing firm-level productivity growth — a representation of both the technological progress and efficiency improvement. Examining the change of firm-level productivity and its determinants over the past decade therefore becomes an important empirical question.

This paper aimed to provide some updated estimations on firms' total factor productivity in China's iron and steel industry and to examine its potential determinants over the period 1998–2007. The paper adopted the semi-parametric regression techniques to deal with the “endogenous input” problem. To check the robustness of the estimations, other estimation methods such as OP, LP and ACF and some traditional approaches such as the first differencing and within effects methods are also applied. The estimation results suggest that firms' TFP in China's iron and steel industry has been steadily increasing over time and this increasing trend is generally consistent with the trend of all manufacturing industries over the sample period.5 The firms' TFP is generally positively related to R&D investment, firm size, market share and marketization reform while negatively related to market monopoly power (measured by the Herfindahl index for the top 8 firms), and firms' capital/labor ratio.