The Empirical Research On The Operation Performance Of China's Urban Public Utilities

Typical urban public utilities provide mix goods from productive spots to specific consumers through pipeline network transmission system. Because the goods they offers have basic quality and obvious positive externality, urban public utilities can be regarded as the public sector which provides public goods; while, Because the consumers or users can't enjoy their commodities or services unless they insert in specific network, the exclusiveness of consumption makes the operating enterprises of urban public utilities can compensate their major operating cost through charging, so, urban public utilities can be regarded as a industry category formed by each operating enterprise. The management objective of the sector is to offer the fair, general, unified commodities or services to urban residents; the operation objective of industry category is to pursue efficiency, creating conditions for the development of enterprises.The conflicting operation objectives, originated from the "contradiction" of the connotation and attributes of urban public utilities, have determined the fact that the operating mechanism of urban public utilities is a "contradiction entity" too. The changing course of the production, construction, financing, operating system of urban public utilities, in fact, is a expanding and shrinking course of two major economic sectors -"public" and "private ", as well as two kinds of economic regulation mechanism of government and market. In China, the operating mechanism of urban public utilities have changed and gone through three periods, namely, the period when government administration determine operation and management-the period when public cause institution deal with monopolistic operation -the period when the government and market regulate mixedly and the public sector and private sector operate mixedly. Say from the normative scope, whether the reform of China's urban public utilities succeed or not and how about it will be effect depend on the fact that in how great degree the reform can solve the so called principal-agent problem among the subjects inside the sector of urban public utilities and the problem of information restrain. While, the measurement and define of this kind of degree shouldbe proved from the empirical scope but not the controversy in theory.This paper, which is correspondent to the three stages of the changing course of the operating mechanism of China's urban public utilities, comes to investigate their state of operation and development empirically. Since China's market-oriented reform, urban public utilities have achieved great development, especially in the initial stage of reform, the enormous efficiency factor released by the reform of operating mechanism have promoted the leap-type development of urban public utilities. As a industry, the scale index of urban public utilities raises constantly and their structure is being optimized constantly, but the proportion of the output value of urban public utilities accounts for GDP and the total industrial output value is still relatively low, which is not in conformity with the basic positions of urban public utilities, and the 'bottleneck' restriction to economic development of urban public utilities has not been eliminated yet. This kind of restriction can be reflected from the output elasticity of the investment of urban public utilities to the increase of GDP, the function to GDP of investment of urban public utilities are obviously lower than the function of investment of non-public urban utilities, that is to say, in macro scope, the resource allocation efficiency of urban public utilities investment is relatively low. The reasons to macroscopic poor efficiency should be looked for from micro mechanism, the empirical analyses to the structure of micro property and funds of urban public utilities show: the operating performance of China's non-state-owned public utilities enterprise are obviously higher than that of the state-owned enterprise; the positive role of foreign investments is obviously higher than other capital sources to the development of urban public utilities. While, China actual facts are state-owned enterprise occupy the absolute domination status of the urban public utilities sector, and foreign businessman investment is insignificant in the proportion of capital source of urban public utilities development. In a word, in the field of Chin's urban public utilities, the property right and financing factors, which have more positive impact to their operating performance, have not played a leading role. The mark of the original traditional system is not still eliminated and the "route rely on" effect of system changes have limited the fundamental change in operating mechanism and structureof China's urban public utilities, which causes the poor micro operating efficiency of China's urban public utilities. The result that reflected in macro scope is the poor efficiency of resource allocation of urban public utilities.