The Effect Of Privatization On Performance Of The Public Utilities

With the privatization of the stated-owned firms in the world, the same changes in Chinese firms have begun from the middle of 1990s. However, the privatization of the public utilities, which belong to monopoly industry and provide public service, began from the early of this century. For a long time, the practical and theoretical people focus on the effect of privatization on the firms'performance, which has richer meaning for the public utilities.Given the characters of the public utilities and the indices of the performance, this dissertation chose three kinds of indices from productivity efficiency, management and controlling capability and social contribution to measure the performance of the public utilities. In terms if privatization, it measure with the ownership structure. Six hypotheses about the effect of privatization on the performance and the influence of the control variables (industry, yearly and region) were tested with the data from 366 firms (281 state-owned and 85 private ones) locating in four provinces from 2004 to 2007, by ANOVA and regression analysis. The results were discussed with contrasting the prior research.The research contributions were as following:(1) This research was the first empirical research about the effect of privatization on the performance of the public utilities. And the prior research on this topic mainly focuses the mode of privatization, the regulation of the government, which did not pay enough attention on this question. The results deepened the research field and provided the empirical evidence.(2) Based on the characters of public industry, this research tested the findings from the general stated-owned firms and explored the unique effect of privatization of the public utilities. Based on integrated thinking, it combined those two sides and had richened the theoretical systems of privatization.(3) Besides of the privatization, the controlling variables also had significant influence on the public utilities'performance. The research on this topic can not ignore the industry differences in the sample. The conclusions reminded us that privatization only had effect on some indices; and the change of R2 explained by privatization was relatively small.