Export And Efficiency Of State-owned Enterprises

Since the mid-1990 s,state-owned enterprises have carried out the reform measures of ”grasping the big and relaxing the small”.At the same time,the profit margin of state-owned manufacturing enterprises has been on the rise,while the export intensity of state-owned enterprises(the proportion of exports in sales)has been declining.Does the above facts mean that the efficiency of state-owned enterprises has been significantly improved compared with that of private enterprises,and what is the reason behind it? Does export competition affect the efficiency of state-owned enterprises? In order to answer these questions,this paper studies the efficiency of state-owned enterprises from two dimensions: direct efficiency and indirect efficiency.In terms of direct efficiency,firstly,the total factor productivity of enterprises is taken as an index to measure the efficiency of state-owned enterprises,and then the productivity measurement methods of Levinsohn and Petrin(2003),De Loecker and Warzynski(2012),Berkowitz et al.(2017)and Yu Miaojie(2018)are used to introduce productivity utilization and export factors.The method of productivity measurement after element is used to measure the productivity of enterprises and analyze the evolution of efficiency of state-owned enterprises.Then,it constructs an index to measure the level of export competition at the enterprise level,and analyses the impact of export competition on the productivity of state-owned enterprises.In terms of indirect efficiency,the institutional reform of state-owned monopoly service sector will cause indirect efficiency losses to manufacturing enterprises.This paper takes the reform of Chinese railway institutions in March 2005 as a policy shock,identifies the indirect efficiency losses caused by the institutional reform of state-owned monopoly service providers to the export and productivity of manufacturing enterprises.Specifically,this paper draws the following main conclusions:First,the productivity of state-owned enterprises did not exceed that of private enterprises of the same scale in 1998-2007,and that of state-owned enterprises of the same scale in 2011-2013 exceeded that of private enterprises.From 1998 to2007,the overall productivity of state-owned enterprises of the same scale experienced rapid growth,and the productivity difference between them and private enterprises also narrowed rapidly.From 2011 to 2013,whether from average productivity or weighted average productivity,the productivity of state-owned enterprises exceeds that of private enterprises.The higher weighted labor productivity of stateowned enterprises is mainly caused by large,high-productivity central enterprises and export state-owned enterprises.Secondly,from 1998 to 2013,the contribution of the improvement of inter-firm resource allocation efficiency to the productivity growth of state-owned enterprises has declined dramatically.The productivity growth of state-owned enterprises relies too much on the growth of enterprises themselves and the exit of inefficient enterprises.The contribution of enterprise entry effect and inter-firm resource redistribution effect to the productivity growth of state-owned enterprises is still very limited.Although the state-owned enterprises showed a rapid growth rate of productivity in 1998-2007,the growth rate of the state-owned enterprises decreased sharply in 2007-2013,especially in this period,the productivity growth rate of export state-owned enterprises was only about 50% of that of non-export state-owned enterprises.Third,Overall,export competition has played a significant but weak role in promoting the productivity of non-state-owned enterprises.The elasticity of the productivity of enterprises in developed countries to export competition is about800 times that of non-state-owned enterprises in China,while export competition has no significant impact on the productivity of state-owned enterprises.The phenomenon that export state-owned enterprises have higher productivity is caused by self-selection effect rather than export learning effect.The main reason why export competition has not significantly affected the productivity of state-owned enterprises is that,different from other types of enterprises,when facing the increase of export competition,the state-owned enterprises have significant differences in the reallocation of export products,enterprise research and development costs,which leads to the failure of export competition to effectively improve the productivity of state-owned enterprises.The impact of export competition on the productivity of state-owned enterprises with different export intensities is also significantly different.Specifically,at present,the export intensity of more than 60% state-owned enterprises is less than 10%.The low export intensity makes the export competition have no significant impact on the productivity of low export intensity state-owned enterprises,and even have a significant negative impact.For the state-owned enterprises whose export intensity is more than 28.5%,the export competition will have a significant positive impact on the productivity of the above-mentioned state-owned enterprises.Fourthly,an important reason why the productivity of state-owned manufacturing enterprises has risen rapidly compared with that of other enterprises is that the transaction fees charged by the state-owned monopoly production and service departments for the services provided by the state-owned enterprises have remained relatively stable,while the transaction fees paid by other types of enterprises for the services purchased by the production and service departments fluctuate considerably,thus indirectly restraining other types of enterprises.The growth of industrial productivity has maintained the steady growth of the productivity of state-owned enterprises.Taking the institutional reform of railway system as a quasi-natural experiment,this paper verifies the above conclusions.in March 2005,the national institutional reform of the railway system implemented.On the whole,by influencing the export price and the number of export enterprises,the railway transport export of enterprises decreased by about 10.9%,which resulted in a 0.3% decrease in the productivity of enterprises using the railway transport export.However,the above institutional reform for state-owned enterprises decreased their export and productivity.There was no significant effect.There are significant differences in transaction fees charged by state-owned monopoly service providers for different types of enterprises,which is an important reason for the rapid growth of stateowned enterprises' productivity relative to private enterprises.