اقتصاد سیاسی خصوصی سازی به سبک چینی : انگیزه ها و محدودیت ها

The paper examines how the privatization of Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) can be successfully triggered and completed. By identifying the motives of local government leaders and the constraints that face them during transition, we conclude that: first, whether local governments are motivated to privatize their SOEs, depends on if the ownership transfer is expected to stimulate sufficiently high growth of local tax revenues without sacrificing the bureaucrats private control benefits. Second, a specific privatization program can succeed only if it manages to satisfy the managerial cooperation constraint, the workers compensation constraint, and the bank-debt-servicing constraint. The motives-cum-constraints political economy approach offers an important explanation for the pace and scope of the ongoing Chinese-style privatization.

Unlike the big-bang mass privatization approach adopted by the Eastern European and Former Soviet Union (EEFSU) countries, the Chinese government until the mid-1990s was still trying to improve the SOE performance by establishing market-oriented incentives1 while maintaining its ownership and control over a great majority of industrial enterprises. Since then, China has entered a new phase of enterprise reform: the government has explicitly pursued a “2-R” strategy—retain government control of large enterprises that operate in the strategic sectors and retreat from small and medium-sized enterprises that operate in highly competitive markets (e.g., Green & Liu, 2005). With regard to the restructuring of large SOEs, corporatization and stock flotation are the key measures used to privatize a fraction of government cash flow rights, in return for funds to the extent that the government is still able to maintain ultimate corporate control (Liu and Sun, 2005a and Liu and Sun, 2005b). Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small and medium SOEs at local level have been granted privatization permission during the last decade. Moreover, a large amount of evidence shows that the major players behind the rise of privatization are local governments, especially those at municipal and county levels (Garnaut et al., 2005, OECD, 2005 and Tenev and Zhang, 2002).2 Then natural questions arise as to what motivates the government to relinquish its control of industrial firms, what constrains the smooth progress of privatizations, and what economic and socio-political factors affect the dynamics of government-initiated privatization programs. Unfortunately, in comparison with a vast amount of literature devoted to assessing the extent of success of privatization by examining the profitability and operational efficiency of privatized enterprises, in-depth analyses of the factors that initially trigger privatization and further constrain its progress are relatively inadequate both in general theoretical formulations and in empirical studies.

Unlike the big-bang mass privatization approach adopted by the Eastern European and Former Soviet Union (EEFSU) countries, the Chinese government until the mid-1990s was still trying to improve the SOE performance by establishing market-oriented incentives1 while maintaining its ownership and control over a great majority of industrial enterprises. Since then, China has entered a new phase of enterprise reform: the government has explicitly pursued a “2-R” strategy—retain government control of large enterprises that operate in the strategic sectors and retreat from small and medium-sized enterprises that operate in highly competitive markets (e.g., Green & Liu, 2005). With regard to the restructuring of large SOEs, corporatization and stock flotation are the key measures used to privatize a fraction of government cash flow rights, in return for funds to the extent that the government is still able to maintain ultimate corporate control (Liu and Sun, 2005a and Liu and Sun, 2005b). Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of small and medium SOEs at local level have been granted privatization permission during the last decade. Moreover, a large amount of evidence shows that the major players behind the rise of privatization are local governments, especially those at municipal and county levels (Garnaut et al., 2005, OECD, 2005 and Tenev and Zhang, 2002).2 Then natural questions arise as to what motivates the government to relinquish its control of industrial firms, what constrains the smooth progress of privatizations, and what economic and socio-political factors affect the dynamics of government-initiated privatization programs. Unfortunately, in comparison with a vast amount of literature devoted to assessing the extent of success of privatization by examining the profitability and operational efficiency of privatized enterprises, in-depth analyses of the factors that initially trigger privatization and further constrain its progress are relatively inadequate both in general theoretical formulations and in empirical studies.