| Since the 1980s, under the influence of global deregulation, a market-oriented reform of electric power aimed at breaking the natural monopoly.and introducing competition was started in the electric power industries by the world-wide nations one after another. From the overall trend, it's the development from the previous vertically integrated monopoly system to the vertically disintegrated monopolistic competition system. The electric power marketization is actually a process transiting from government's strict regulation to the deregulation on the electric power industries and is also a process of creative regulation and constant re-structuring regulation with the purpose to improve the output efficiency of the electric power industries. Efficiency is not only the ground for deregulation, but also the standard for checking if the new regulation is reasonable or not and how to improve it. Efficiency analysis plays a key role in building up a competitive market structure and re-structuring the regulation during the electric power marketization. The growing of the technology efficiency and total factor productivity has created a more efficient research framework for the comprehensive efficiency analysis of the electric power industries.In the year 2002, the State Council published the Reform Program of Power System, which indicated the starting of China's reform of electric power marketization. The overall objectives of the reform are:break the monopoly, introduce the competition, improve efficiency, cut down the cost, establish a sound electricity price system, optimize the resources allocation, promote the electric power development and national network interconnection, and establish an electric power market system featured by separated government functions from enterprise management, fair competition, orderly open and healthy development. Since the reform of the electric power marketization, China's power industries have made great achievements, but are facing severe challenges as well. The fundamental problems of China's power industries development are:how to further improve the efficiency and productivity, how to measure the development and changes of the efficiency and productivity of China's power industries, how to analyze the relevant factors affecting the efficiency and productivity of national power industries and how to bring forward the issue of strengthening the power regulations in order to improve the efficiency and productivity of power industries. This is of vital importance to establish a safe, environment-protecting, economic and modern electric power system, and to improve the development quality and efficiency of China's electric power industries, which constitute the basic motivation of this thesis. The research on China's power industries efficiency and productivity has great theoretical and realistic meanings.The analysis of power industries efficiency and productivity could mainly be divided into three aspects:measure and calculate technology efficiency, analyze the factors affecting the technology efficiency and measure, calculate and resolve the increase of the total factor productivity. As far as the method of efficiency and productivity analysis is concerned, the SFA and DEA are the most popular ones; majority of the literatures adopt the regression analysis with the technology efficiency as the dependent variable and with the ownership structure, market structure, price regulation and environment regulation, etc., as the independent variable. Although some scholars (Tsutsui and Goto,2009) think that it's more efficient to evaluate the overall efficiency than to estimate the efficiency of one link, however, from the existing literatures, the research on analyzing the efficiency and productivity of the power generation and power transmission and distribution accounts for a bigger proportion. Based on the current situation of China's electric power marketization reform, this thesis has used the SFA and DEA respectively to study the efficiency and productivity of China's power generation industries and electric power companies of integrated transmission and distribution since the reform of electric power marketization in 2002.The thesis has measured and calculates the technology efficiency of China's power generation industries by adopting the SFA and the panel data of the coal-fired power industries from 30 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities across the nation during the year 2003-2009, and mainly focused on the impact of ownership structure, electricity and coal price and environment regulation on the technology efficiency of power generation industries. Currently, most scholars has adopted the DEA method to analyze the efficiency and productivity of power generation industries (Lan and Shiu,2004; Tao Feng,ect.,2008; Bai Xuejie, Song Ying,2009;); some scholars adopt the Directional Distance Function (Wang Bin,2010), however, no one has ever used the SFA to study the efficiency and productivity. Most foreign literatures adopt SFA method instead of DEA method to measure the technical efficiency in the power generation industry because DEA method is applicable to carry out the efficiency analysis in the industry with more input and more output, but the power generation industry is a typical of a structure of more input and single output. Besides, compared with DEA method, another advantage SFA has is that it takes account of the effect the statistical noise (originating from the approximation error caused by ignoring the input variables and choice of functional forms) has on the technical efficiency. The technical efficiency from this method is more accurate.The main findings and conclusions of the power industries technology efficiency will be discussed herein are:(1) the overall technology efficiency of China's power generation industries is quite low with the average rate 0.47 during the year 2003-2009. The estimated technology efficiency in this thesis is lower than those in any previous literatures; (2) the trend of the technology efficiency varying with time presents a parabola with the opening downward, which is different from the monotonous form of increasing annually as observed in previous studies. The existing literatures either adopt the cross-section data to analyze the technology efficiency which reflecting no movement or adopt the panel data of less time span which shows the monotonous trend of steady increase varying with time. The relative long time span of panel data used in this thesis helps to discover the trend of the technology efficiency representing a parabola with the downward opening:during the year 2003-2005, the technology increased steadily, but since 2006, it has been falling down; (3) the gap of technology efficiency over the power generation industries across the provinces is quite big, so that the developed regions or provinces rich in coal resources may gain the higher technology efficiency than those of less developed and lack of coal resources.This thesis has further analyzed the factors affecting the technology efficiency of China's power generation industries:(1) the ownership structure has significant impact on the technology efficiency of power generation industries, that is, more state-owned assets, lower technology efficiency; (2) This paper finds out the positive and negative relations between the electricity price, coal price and the efficiency in power generation industry respectively but with no statistical significance. This finding has an utmost significance on the price regulation reform of power. The price regulation can be divided into price level regulation and price structure regulation. At present, most people, especially the power generation enterprise, are concerned about the adjustment of the price level and hope to ease the operation pressure by means of "the linkage between the coal and the electricity" and the price increases. However, according to the research results in this paper, the price increase can improve the business performance of power generation industry in the short term but could not stimulate the power industry to increase the efficiency. More specifically, the increase on on-line power price can improve the business performance in power generation enterprise and enhance its profit level, but the technical efficiency of power generation enterprise may not be increased. What's worse, it may be decreased as a result of the influences caused by technical progress. So only the reform on the price level regulation and the performance-based incentive mechanism for power price regulation can effectively recover all costs during the supply of power and stimulate the power industry to increase its efficiency. The "Linkage between the Coal and Electricity" can decrease the pressure of power generation enterprise from increasing costs of power generation to some degree but can not make it form efficient internal motivation to improve its efficiency so as to have substantial effects on improving the efficiency of power generation enterprise.(3)the relationship between environment regulations and technology efficiency of power generation industries represents the "U"pattern. This thesis uses the emission of SO2 to indicate the strength of the environment regulation, which turns out to be, in a short period, the weaker the environment regulation, the higher SO2 emission and the higher efficiency of the power generation; but in the long run, the strong the environment regulation, the lower SO2 emission and the higher efficiency of the power generation. The reason for this mainly lies in that the power generation enterprise is in need of a large number of costs to assemble the desulfurization facilities in the early stage of environmental regulation while it can not accept the sudden cost increase. So this has certain influence on the efficiency of power generation enterprise. From the general trend in the long term, the thermal power industry in most areas under the pressure of environmental regulation can adopt new production technology and process, adjust resource allocation and regulate the scientific management to improve the technical efficiency. Continually strengthening environmental regulation could stimulate the technical efficiency of the thermal power industry. (4)This paper also shows a parabola relationship with its opening down between the size and the production without efficiency in an enterprise. Most of the observations are in the left of the critical points and concentrated in the top of the parabola, which suggests that there are significant diseconomies in the scale of the power plants in China under the present average size of enterprises, namely, the more quickly the size develops towards the critical point and the higher the production without efficiency is. (5) in the long run, the reduction of standard coal consumption has positive impact on the power generating efficiency, but in the short period, with the reduction of standard coal consumption, though less fuel is input, but more facility upgrading and capital investment is required, which inserts a negative impact on the power generation industries; (6) the improvement of facility utilization has a significant influence on the efficiency of power generation industries.In the current literatures, only Lam and Shiu (2004) measured and calculated the total factor productivity of China's power generation industries, but the research period is between year 1994-2000. All researches after the reform of electric marketization in 2002, only measure and calculate the technology efficiency value of the power industries, lacking in the studies of the increase and resolution of the total factor productivity. In this thesis, based on the calculation of technology efficiency through the SFA, the author uses Kumbhakar's method to further calculate and resolve the increase of total factor productivity of China's power generation industries since the reform of electric power marktization in 2002, and finds out, during the year 2003-2009, the average annual growth rate of power generation industries is 4.55% and this mainly depends on the advance of technology. The above result is higher than that of the Lam and Shiu (2004), whose research shows the average annual growth rate is 2.1% during the year 1995-2000.The thesis also utilize the method of DEA and Malmquist index to analyze the panel data from 24 provinces during 2005-2009 and estimate the technology efficiency of power transmission and distribution and total fact productivity. In the analysis of factors affecting the technology efficiency of power transmission and distribution, the thesis adopts the two-stage estimation to demonstrate and exam the impact of increased investment of grid and electricity price on the transmission and distribution efficiency. At present, the data adopted in the research on China's power transmission and distribution and productivity are either the section data of a certain year and the sample company is limited to a certain province (Zhao Huiru,ect.,2004),or the panel data with a short time span and small amount of samples, e.g. Liang Zhihong's research (2007)on China's power transmission and distribution and productivity has the time span of three years from 1995 to 1997, and the samples are only involving 8 provinces. The small amount of samples and relatively short period of time span could not comprehensively measure the efficiency of power transmission and distribution and productivity. The samples in this thesis of China's power transmission and distribution and productivity is obviously more than the previous researches. This thesis finds that:the average technology efficiency value of power enterprises across the nation is between 0.6-0.7; the researched Malmquist productivity index of each year is greater than 1 and the average total factor productivity is 3.9%, which indicates China's total factor productivity has overall been improved. The increase of total factor productivity is the joint result of technology progress and integrated technology efficiency, of which the technology efficiency is the key factor for the increase of total factor productivity of power industries.In the analysis of the affecting factors of power transmission and distribution technology efficiency, currently, the existing researches in China limit to the measurement and calculation of the increase of technology efficiency and total factor productivity, while the analysis of factors affecting the technology efficiency is almost not involved. Based on the measurement and calculation, This thesis has initially analyzed the key factors affecting China's power transmission and distribution technology efficiency, mainly adopting the two-stage estimation to demonstrate and analyze the impact of speed-up investment in grid. electricity price, user density, number of employees, economy development, region's natural resources and areas on the power transmission and distribution technology efficiency. Among the literatures available in domestic and oversea, the demonstrated analysis is initially to be involved in the relationship of speed-up investment in grid and the technology efficiency of power transmission and distribution. The present power marketization reform in China has only completed the first step "Separation between the Plant and the Network". The transmission, distribution and sale are still implementing the integrated business. On-line power price and sale price are the main two forms of price in our power market. The transmission and distribution price means that the sale prices minus the on-line power price and the transmission and distribution losses. Three models in this paper are applied to check the influences that the on-line power price, sale price and the transmission and distribution price in the proportion of the sale price has on the efficiency of the transmission and distribution grid. The empirical results show that increasing investment on the grid, on-line power price and sale price respectively have a significant negative correlation with the transmission and distribution technical efficiency while the proportion of the transmission and distribution price has an obvious positive correlation. Under continuous increase of the investment on the grid in China, such discovery of the relation between the increasing investment on the grid and the transmission and distribution technical efficiency means a lot to improve the investment regulation on the grid. This discovery in the paper is of particular importance to deepen the reform on power price and gradually improve the formation mechanism of the on-line power price, the transmission and distribution price and the sale price.Based on above research results, the thesis finally suggests the corresponding policies respectively on the increase of efficiency and productivity of the power generation industries and power transmission and distribution. The suggestions are:without prejudice to the control position of the state-owned ownership, strengthen the reform of power generation industries ownership, improve the diversification of the ownership structure of the power generation industries, rationalize the electricity reforming system, adopt the incentive electricity price regulation, further enhance the environment regulation and develop the electricity price role in adjusting the energy saving and emission reduction, take measures to reduce the fluctuation of facility utilization rate, increase the overall facility utilization. The suggestion for increasing the efficiency of power transmission and distribution and productivity are:optimize the grid investment structure, bring the power transmission into the comprehensive energy transport system, promote the extensive resource allocation of the grid, strengthen the construction of power network investment, establish an efficient system of incentive and retrains on the investment, reform the current transmission and distribution electricity regulation system, build up an independent transmission and distribution price system, introduce the method of incentive regulation, carry out the pilot program of separating the transmission from the distribution, expand the scale of VIP users to direct purchase electricity and intensify the reform of electric power marketization.
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