Diversification Of Property Rights And Revitalization Of Old Industrial Bases

Old industrial bases in traditional institutions are formed by preferentially developing capital-intensive heavy industries in the context of capital scarcity and labor abundance. Going with the foundation and maturity of market economy, most old industrial bases, especially their state-owned enterprises, are encountering astriction of traditional institutions and heavy historical burden, which induce a sharp decrease in state-owned enterprises' profits. Therefore, how to revitalize the old industrial bases becomes the hotspot of academic research. The author holds the opinion that diversification of state-owned enterprises' property rights is the keypoint to revitalize old industrial bases. The reason is that property rights are basic rules for a society, and their arrangements are of great significance to enterprises' performance. The state-owned enterprises' simplex property rights in old industrial bases lead to many problems, such as bad performance, confusion of government function and enterprise affairs, etc. These problems, which strongly affect the economy of old industrial bases, can be effectively solved by diversification of property rights. Through analyses of state-owned enterprises' property rights characters in old industrial bases, the author finds that from microcosmic aspect, state-owned enterprises' property rights are incomplete. And from macroscopical aspect, it is proved that state-owned enterprises still play the most important role although the amount of state-owned enterprises is decling, while non-state-owned enterprises have not been well-developed. In addition, econometric models suggest that in general, state-owned enterprises are less efficient than non-state-owned enterprises. This empirical result implies that it is helpful to lower the proportion of state-owned enterprises, enhance the proportion of non-state-owned enterprises and carry on a reform of diversifying property rights. According to the different characters of industries, the paper suggests various ways to diversify property rights. In competitive industries, state-owned economy should properly quit while non-state-owned economy should enter the industries. In monopoly industries, old industrial bases should learn some experience from foreign countries, such as "gold stock", "state-owned & non-state-run", etc. In special industries which are of great significance to the country,the state-owned economy should still maintain. Moreover, the paper expatiates that the government should promote diversification of property rights through eliminating the entering barriers for non-state-owned economy, consummating property rights exchange market, etc.