The Study On The Effect Of Agency Problem On Economic Performance In State-Owned Toll Highway Operating Enterprises

As of Dec.31 st,2020,the mileage of China’s toll highway has reached 179,000 km,ranking the first in the world.However,while the toll highway industry is developing rapidly,it is also facing the dilemma of the expanding gap between revenue and expenditure annually,which to a certain extent reflects the poor economic performance of the toll highway operating entities.The toll highway industry in China implements a dual-track operation mode in which government repayment highway and operational highway coexist.Among them,the characteristics of government repayment highway such as monopoly management,the separation between revenue and expenditure and public benefit,intensify the problem of low economic performance in its operating entity.For this issue,existing researches have made useful exploration from management system,operation mode and scale efficiency respectively,and have achieved numerous referential results.However,with the completion of the institution into enterprise system,the state-owned toll highway operating enterprises have become the operation and management subject of government repayment highway,and the economic sense of the principal-agent relationship has become clearer,so the resulting agency problem may have a significant impact on economic performance.At present,however,this issue has not yet attracted sufficient attention from the academic community,so it is difficult to provide a reliable theoretical basis for the subsequent system design.Therefore,it is necessary to investigate the economic performance of state-owned toll highway operating enterprises based on the perspective of principal-agent,so as to provide theoretical and practical solutions to break the bottleneck of economic performance and promote the high-quality development of the toll highway industry.In this paper,first,the quantitative measurement and comparative analysis of economic performance in state-owned toll highway operating enterprises are conducted to clarify the historical evolution and bottleneck of economic performance.Second,on the basis of clarifying the status of principal-agent relationship in operating enterprises,the manifestation and formation mechanism of agency problems are systematically analyzed to establish the theoretical foundation for the subsequent model construction.Third,a multi-task principal-agent model is constructed based on the characteristics of the principal-agent relationship and business attributes in operating enterprises,and the results of the agency problem on economic performance are deduced.In addition,based on the inherent structural factors of economic performance,the transmission paths are analyzed,and the research hypotheses are proposed.Moreover,the quantitative and time-series evolution of the agency problem is analyzed,and the economic performance measured aforementioned is used as an indicator to construct an econometric regression model and empirically examine the impact of the agency problem on economic performance,so as to test the realistic explanation strength of the proposed research hypothesis and the theoretical model.And finally,based on the theoretical and empirical findings,combined with the assessment results of group restructuring,the reform strategies for governing the agency problem are proposed with the goal of improving the economic performance in operating enterprises.The main research contents and conclusions are as follows:1.From the perspective of total factor productivity,the economic performance and intrinsic structural factors of state-owned toll highway operating enterprises are measured using OP/LP semi-parametric estimation method and Sequential-Malmquist index method.The results show that the annual average value and annual average growth rate of total factor productivity in operating enterprises from 2000 to 2019 are-2.04 and 0.77%,respectively,indicating that the economic performance of operators is poor and growing slowly,and that non-production factor inputs not only fail to play a positive role,but also suppress the contribution of capital and labor inputs to total output.The index decomposition shows that technical progress and technical efficiency are the main factors affecting economic performance for operating enterprises.Regional heterogeneity results show that the economic performance of operating enterprises shows a decreasing trend from the east to the west and then to the central regions.2.Combining the background of the establishment and the restructuring process of state-owned toll highway operating enterprises,the status and characteristics of the principal-agent relationship are sorted out.Based on industry and enterprise dimensions,the manifestation form and formation mechanism of agency problem are analyzed.Results show that the industry management system,traditional concepts of the industry,enterprise capital management mode,enterprise salary management mode,and enterprise institutional settings all exhibit different agency problems.The property right issue of operating enterprises,infrastructure attributes and monopoly characteristics of toll highway industry are the formation mechanisms of agency problems.And the agency problems exhibited by industry management mode,remuneration management mode and internal institutional settings have a greater negative impact on the economic performance of operating enterprises.3.By constructing a multi-task principal-agent model based on the characteristics of the principal-agent relationship and business attributes in state-owned toll highway operating enterprises,a deductive derivation of the economic performance to the agency problem is presented,and the transmission path is theoretically interpreted with the perspective of the intrinsic structural factors in economic performance.Results show that when there is an agency problem,the total benefit to the principal of the operating enterprise is always lower than that it would receive under complete information.Excessive emphasis on social tasks by principals and higher marginal cost of effort by management to accomplish economic tasks lead to management’s reluctance to put effort into economic performance improvement,which results in loss of economic performance.Further theoretical analyses show that technology level,technical efficiency and scale efficiency are the main paths through which operating enterprises’ agency problems negatively affect economic performance.4.On the basis of the quantitative and time-series evolution analysis of agency problem,the results and transmission paths of agency problem on economic performance of state-owned toll highway operating enterprises are examined by using a two-way fixed effects model.The results indicate that the agency cost for operating companies remains high for a long time,and agency problems significantly reduce the economic performance and have a marginal decreasing long-term negative impact on economic performance.Agency problems have the greatest negative impact on technical efficiency,followed by scale efficiency,and the least impact on technological progress.Further analysis shows agency problems of operating enterprises will negatively affect macroeconomics by influencing their own economic performance,which is manifested in the increase of toll rates and the extension of toll years,thus increasing the transportation costs of the whole society and causing losses to social welfare and economic development.5.Based on the difference in differences(DID)model with propensity matching score(PSM),the policy implementation effect of group restructuring is evaluated,and combined with the aforementioned findings,the reform strategy for governing the agency problem is comprehensively planned in three dimensions: government,industry and enterprise,aiming at improving the economic performance of state-owned toll highway operating enterprises.The evaluation results show that although the group restructuring has promoted the provincial toll highway mileage to a certain extent,it has significantly increased the agency cost and thus suppressed the entrepreneurial operation on the improvement of economic performance.From the government dimension,the reform strategy lies in transforming the traditional industry concept and clarifying property rights boundary of enterprises.At the industry level,governing the administrative monopoly and innovating the financing mode of the industry is the way out.From the enterprise level,reforming the incentive and constraint mechanism as well as streamlining the internal structure of enterprises should be the direction of reform.Based on a systemic comprehension of the status of economic performance and the characteristics of agency problems in state-owned toll highway operating enterprises,this paper explores the effects of agency problems on economic performance in both theory and empirical dimensions,and then feasible reform strategies are provided for the governance of agency problem in state-owned toll highway operators.While deepening the theoretical study of economic performance in the toll highway industry,this study expands the scope of application for principal-agent theory in infrastructure state-owned enterprises and provides feasible reform strategies for the governance of the agency problem in state-owned toll highway operations.