Selection, Staging and Sequencing in the Recent Chinese
Privatization
Jun Du§
and
Xiaoxuan Liu¶
(This version: April 2015)
Abstract
Selection in privatization is a decision-making process of choosing state-owned enterprises
(SOEs), prioritizing and sequencing privatizing events, and determining the extent of private
ownership in partial privatization. We investigate this process in an important but rarely
studied case of China. Based on the SOE population over 1998-2008, we track 49,456 wholly
SOEs and identify 9,359 privatization cases over time. Our econometric analysis concludes:
(i) The privatization selection is a complex decision-making process in which local
governments balance between various economic, financial and political objectives. (ii) In the
recent Chinese privatization, firm performance relates to the selection, staging and
sequencing in privatization in an inverted-U fashion. The worse and the best performing
SOEs are more likely to remain state-owned, maintain higher state holding when privatized,
and are less likely to be privatized later in time. These patterns suggest the privatization
reform slowdown and the underlying changes in the privatization policy.
Keywords: Privatization, Restructuring, Political economy, China
JEL Classification numbers: G38; L33; L51; P3; P5
Economics and Strategy Group, Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK; e-mail
[email protected]; Stockholm China Economic Research Institute, Stockholm School of Economics, P.O. Box
6501, 113 83 Stockholm, Sweden.
¶
Institute of Economics, Chinese Social Science Academy, 2 Yue Tan Bei Xiao Jie , Beijing 100836, e-mail:
[email protected].
Acknowledgements: Jun Du grateful acknowledges financial support from the project, “Privatisation, foreign
investment and firm performance in China”, funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)
(Award RES-000-22-0729). The authors would also like to thank Nigel Driffield, Tomasz Mickiewicz, Anders
C. Johansson, Yuan Li and Michail Karoglou for their comments and suggestions. All remaining errors are our
own.
§
1
1. Introduction
Privatization is arguably the most crucial economic reform in a command economy. A large
body of literature has studied the causes, processes and effects of this important economic
policy (see recent surveys by Djankov and Murrell, 2002; Megginson and Netter, 2001;
Megginson, 2005 and Estrin et al., 2009). However, while the outcome of privatization has
stimulated a great deal of research, the selection process of state-owned enterprises (SOEs)
into privatization programs has received less attention (Szentpéteri and Telegdy, 2010).
Selection in privatization refers to the decision-making process of choosing candidates
among SOEs, prioritizing and sequencing privatizing events as well as, in the case of partial
privatization, determining a desirable extent of private ownership. Selection exists in any
privatization, even in countries where a rapid privatization was adopted (Gupta et al., 2008).
The key questions of selection may differ, in that prioritizing and sequencing may be more
acute for mass privatization, while selecting and staging privatization may be more relevant
in a gradual progression.
There are several reasons why it is fundamental to understand the selection process.
First, choosing appropriate SOEs to privatize and sequence the process is strategically
important for implementing privatization policy for an economy, not the least because of the
demonstration effects of earlier privatized examples (Gupta et al., 2008). The industrial sector
dynamics are affected as a result of market power changes. This will further alter the
dynamics of societies, which consequently affect the sustainability of the privatization and
other economic policies.
Second, it is critical to pick the privatization candidates that are “ready” at the right
time in order to optimize the conversion outcome. The past experience suggests that the
selection process determines the results of ownership change and economic structuring
(Estrin et al., 2009).
2
Moreover, methodologically, a rigorous evaluation of the privatization outcome cannot
be delivered without a proper understanding and effective treatment of the selection process
(Gupta et al., 2008; Driffield and Du, 2008; Estrin et al., 2009).1
Yet, the selection process of privatization is complex and opaque. Conceptually,
economic, social and political factors independently or jointly influence the decision-making
process of privatization and the dynamics between state-owned enterprises, central
government, local governments, domestic buyers, foreign investors and often employees and
other social forces. The existing theories are inadequate to deal with the complicated process
and the dynamics in this process. For instance, there are few theoretical models that can be
easily adaptable to take multiple selection criteria into consideration and to form testable
predictions. Empirical investigations are also limited by the availability of appropriate data to
study privatization and the existing findings are mixed. In addition, the empirical literature
unevenly focuses on Central Eastern Europe (CEE)2 and India (Dinc and Gupta, 2011), with
much less work on China, especially on the recent privatization movements (Jefferson and
Su, 2006; Liu et al., 2006; Huyghebaert and Quan, 2009).3
This study focuses on the recent privatization in China, for the sheer importance of
privatization as a key reform that has led to, to a large extent, the economic prosperity China
has achieved. Understanding privatization in China holds a key to understanding the success
and pitfalls of the Chinese economy, and to predicting the sustainability of its growth and
development. Unfortunately what we know is still little. One of the barriers is that the
economic theories on the process of privatization are mostly developed in the context where
central governments solely or mainly drive the process. It is rather different in China where
1
The Djankov and Murrell (2002) survey indicates that 47% of the pre-2003 studies do not control for the
selection issue.
2
Such as Poland (De Fraja and Roberts, 2009); Czech Republic (Gupta et al., 2008) and Romania (Szentpéteri
and Telegdy, 2010).
3
Earlier work includes, for example, Jefferson and Su (2006), Liu et al. (2006), and Huyghebaert and Quan
(2009), among others.
3
the process was gradual and market competition played important roles, and so did the
managers and employees of the SOEs. Hence it is necessary to explore the ways in which the
existing theories can be adapted to Chinese institutional characteristics.
Furthermore, in the recent decade noticeable new trends and phenomena emerged in the
Chinese privatization policy with important implications for the subsequent enterprise reform
and market competition. However, the existing studies on the Chinese privatization are outdated when it comes to addressing contemporary issues. It has been over a decade since the
beginning of privatization, yet even though the state ownership of the economy has been
considerably reduced, the state sector remains large and the privatization process is far from
completion (Du et al., 2014). We need to identify the empirical regularities that can inform us
on the dynamic changes in the China privatization process over time.
This study is set out to achieve these objectives. It extends the previous literature by
examining the theoretical predictions about government objectives by allowing a nonlinear
relationship between firm performance and privatization. Based on the population of the
SOEs over 1998-2008, we track all the privatization cases from 49,456 originally fully stateowned enterprises, and we find robust results of the following: (i) The privatization selection
is the result of a complex decision-making process in which local governments maximize the
payoff by balancing between various economic, financial and political motives. (ii) In the
recent Chinese privatization, firm performance relates to the selection, staging and
sequencing in privatization in an inverted-U fashion. The worst and the best performing
SOEs tend to remain in the state sector, and privatize with less magnitude when they are
selected to privatize; and be privatized later in time if they are ever privatized. This reflects
the changing policy in the recent ownership reform in China and mirrors the recent debate on
“The State advances, the Private retreats” (Du et al., 2014).
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 discusses the background of
4
the recent Chinese privatization. Section 3 reviews the theoretical considerations and
empirical evidence of the selection in privatization. Following Section 4 on data, we present
the empirical model, explain the estimation strategy, and discuss the main findings of the
paper in Section 5-7. Section 8 concludes the paper.
2. The recent privatization in China
This section briefly reviews the recent enterprise reform in China as the background of the
large-scale privatization, analyses the distinctive characteristics of the Chinese privatization
from elsewhere.4
China’s privatization has a rather unique background and institutional setting. In the
CEE and Common Wealth of Independent States (CIS) where central governments pushed
the privatization policy at the outset of the liberalization adopting a top-to-bottom approach,
governments were almost the sole drivers. This was not the case for China. The Chinese
government has delayed privatizing SOEs for as long as it could. In fact, the large scale of
privatization happened much later than the initial economic reform and marketization. The
following momentous transitions depict the situation in which the Chinese government had to
adopt a large-scale privatization strategy around 1998. To avoid drastic ownership changes,
China’s earlier enterprise reform before the mid-1990s was centred on the control rights
reform, while allowing the rapid entry of domestic private firms and foreign investors.
Afterwards, the central government decentralized the affiliated SOEs to governments at a
lower level (provincial, municipal/prefecture, and county and township level), in the broader
context of decentralization (Xu, 2011). Smaller and poor performing SOEs were
“downgraded” to lower government affiliations. By the end of 1998, 15 central governmental
specialized industrial ministries were abolished, renamed or restructured (Liu, 2008). This
5
meant that by then, their original functionality of managing SOEs was nearly dissolved, as
the majority of the previously centrally affiliated SOEs were no longer under the central
government’s control and planning.
A crucial reform occurred in 1994 when the double-track price system5 ended and the
new financial accounting system and the income tax law were enforced. Chinese SOEs had
never been so utterly exposed to the invisible hand of the market, and this marked a turning
point for China’s enterprise reform and a new beginning of the marketized economy (Liu,
2008).
Consequently, the scale of SOEs’ loss making was unprecedented and devastating
(see Table 1). Not only the extent of the total loss by loss-making SOEs was mounting, the
scale of loss-making industrial sectors escalated dramatically at the national level (Column
1). In a three-year period (1994-1997), the number of two-digit sectors that on average that
made losses almost doubled (Column 3). The situation of the state sector was best described
as “a collectively sinking ship”. It was clear that the “reform without losers” strategy could
no longer be sustained (Lau, Qian and Roland, 2000). What formed a stark contrast was the
booming non-state sector (Zhu, 2012) and incoming FDI in an increasingly competitive
market, leaving the government and the loss-making SOEs no choice but to reform radically.6
Therefore, competition has served a prerequisite for privatization, quite the opposite from
what has been observed elsewhere in the world (Mickiewicz, 2010).
[Table 1 is here]
Among the options to turn around this situation, privatizing SOEs was probably the
most effective one (Xu, 2011). Hence, a large-scale privatization was launched in 1998 by the
government and the reform was voluntarily supported by the failing SOEs. Liu and Zhu
A more detailed account of the history of China’s take-off can be found in a recent symposium in the Journal
of Economic Perspectives such as Huang (2012), while Jefferson and Su (2006) details the stages of China’s
early ownership reform in the late 1990s.
5
It was designed as a transitional price mechanism from a planned economy to a market economy.
4
6
(2012) describe the recent privatization in China in two stages: Between 1995 and 2004, the
enterprise reform carried out under the state’s development strategy can be characterized by
privatizing small and medium-size SOEs under the slogan “retain the large, release the small”
(Zhuada fangxiao), and letting the state exit competitive sectors. For small and medium
SOEs, the policy was loud and clear that they were free to exit from the state sector, the
approaches to this were flexible, without much government involvement.
For large SOEs, the policy was noticeably different, and governments had much more
control in the privatization choices. During 2002 and 2004, large SOEs were restructured and
privatized through share-holding systems. As part of this initiative, former Premier Zhu
Rongji placed China’s loss-making SOEs on a strict three-year schedule, during which they
were supposed to implement a modern enterprise system and convert losses to surpluses. Due
to political and ideological constraints, privatization has occurred in a camouflaged way of
“transforming the system” or “gaizhi” (Garnaut et al., 2005).7 Nevertheless, a large
proportion of Chinese SOEs have been privatized. Not only a large amount of small SOEs
were “let go” (Fan, 2002), there was also a significant decline in the number of large and
medium-size SOEs. Guo et al. (2008) report that by the end of 2005, about two-thirds of the
Chinese SOEs and COEs with an annual turnover of more than 5 million RMB Yuan (about
USD 620,000) had been privatized and the total asset value involved in the process was about
11.4 trillion RMB (or 1.63 trillion USD).8
China’s approach to privatization was versatile, ranging from initial public offering
(IPO), management buyout (MBO), employee buyout (EBO), and direct selling (also see Zhu
2012). The local governments and the SOEs jointly chose the specific method, which marks
another unambiguous difference from the top to bottom approach in rapid mass privatization
6
Also see Naughton (1992) and Jefferson et al. (2000).
“gaizhi” means “transforming the system” in Chinese. During this period, the word “privatization” has been
largely avoided formally.
7
7
elsewhere in the world (Estrin et al., 2009; Mickiewicz, 2010). In the economically
decentralized China, provincial and municipal governments have relatively large freedom in
setting up their own strategies and tactics of achieving the unified economic goal. In
principle, SOEs may propose a restructuring plan themselves. Once approved by the local
governments, SOEs may carry out the restructuring plan as proposed, and may select the
specific approach and pace according to the circumstances.
Another notable feature of the Chinese privatization is that it was experimental and
was carried out by municipal governments at their discretion under regional competition for
economic growth (Xu, 2011). Hence, the process of privatization followed the market
principle and resources were allocated to better use.
3. Government motives of privatization selection
Privatization, as an economic policy, is a tool to depoliticize SOEs and provides
incentives for economic restructuring (Kornai, 1992). This process is dictated by
government’s economic, fiscal and political motives, some of which are common while
others are specific to context. Improving economic efficiency is considered a key government
objective of privatizing SOEs (Megginson and Netter, 2001), hence governments that
maximize economic efficiency will privatize less profitable, loss-making and less productive
firms first (Gupta et al., 2008). This is because the most inefficient firms are assumed to
experience the greatest improvement in efficiency through privatization (Claessens et al.
1997; Frydman et al. 1999). In extreme cases, unviable firms should be closed down, just as
it happened in the Czech Republic (Hashi et al., 1997) and to a smaller extent in China (Liu,
2008). The existing empirical studies deliver mixed results on this prediction.9
8
The other side of the enterprise reform was the reforms in labour markets which were parallel (see Meng 2012
for a recent review).
9
Gupta et al. (2008) use profitability and disparity between the marginal product of labour and wage in the
Czech case, and find support in the prediction. Based on 1995-2001 firm level data, Song and Yao (2004) also
find the cherry-picking phenomenon. However, Dinc and Gupta (2011) do not find any correlation between
8
To raise fiscal revenue and reduce the financial burden is an important and often
short-term government motive of privatization (Mickiewicz, 2010).10 While income from
direct sales was never a main motive for Chinese privatization,11 the Chinese governments do
maximize revenue through retained profits and tax income. Chinese SOEs provide two
streams of revenue – profit/dividend remittance and tax revenues, with the latter being mainly
sales tax and income tax.12 Given tax is paid on profits where the firm is located,
governments care less about its ownership13, more about whether or not firms are profitable.
Consequently, revenue-maximizing local governments will then adopt the rational strategy of
keeping more profit-making state-owned firms to retain control and collect higher dividend
remittance. At the same time, they will privatize poor performing firms, hoping that they will
perform better in private hands so that the local governments could collect higher tax income.
The recent intensive banking reforms have made the state-owned banks more vigilant in
participating in the restructuring of SOEs. They saw the SOE restructuring as an opportunity
to clear the accumulated non-performing loans. Hence, local governments have the incentive
to let go of the loss-making SOEs with a higher debt level, as this helps governments relieve
the financial burden, and helps banks relieve non-performing loans. In a similar vein,
governments maximizing revenue may select and sequence privatizing SOEs with higher
compensation and settlement costs.
efficiency and selection for privatization in India, nor do the two studies using Chinese data (Guo and Yao,
2005; Liu et al., 2007).
10
Fiscal problems may be acute at the time of the institutional reform, which may both affect the capacity of the
government to raise tax revenue and result in some temporary increase in spending. This is where privatization
revenue can make a difference, such as in Czech Republic and Hungary (Mickiewicz, 2010).
11
Unlike part of the CEE where mass privatization took place, the gradual nature of privatization made local
governments feel uncertain about the direction of the reform. The privatization is supervised by the Central
government, and the performance of local government officials is evaluated by the system of administrative
centralization. Hence, exchanging SOEs for quick cash would be very risky in this context. Moreover, unlike in
the CEE countries, local governments rarely had any large shortage of funding, partially due to the significant
income from land use.
12
Since 1994, most SOEs stopped remitting profits to governments, tax income has been the main source of
revenue (Qian and Roland, 1998; Cao et al., 1999; Liu, 2008).
13
As a popular saying goes, “it doesn’t matter what it is (the ownership), what matters is where it is (i.e. the
location, hence where the tax should be paid)”.
9
A related, but subtly different incentive is to sell off the best SOEs, especially at the
beginning of the reform to demonstrate the reform resolution, and provide investors
particularly foreign investors, good investment opportunities (Gallagher, 2005). The
underlying revenue-seeking and growth-seeking motivation is just as much political as
financial, because in a country where growth is a main source of legitimacy for the ruling
party, local fiscal revenue and economic growth are directly linked with cadre evaluation,
upon which the promotion prospects of individual politicians hinge (Chen et al., 2005; Li and
Zhou, 2005).
At the meantime, minimizing risks of receiving public accusation of selling public assets
and inciting social discontent is key to avoid damages of promotion opportunities,14 as the
losses of public assets to private and foreign owners may fuel social unrest,15 particularly
when SOEs were sold at an undervalued price.16 It is easier to argue for selling poor
performing SOEs, or selling them first before the better ones. Hence, local governments will
keep as many decent SOEs in “people’s” hands as possible, for as long as possible.
To summarize, local governments take into account the objectives of maximizing
economic efficiency and fiscal income, and minimizing political risks when making a
balanced decision regarding privatization process. While each individual theory provides
useful insights into this process, they jointly appear conflicting. Hence there is yet a unified
theoretical framework that satisfactorily explains the complicated process of privatization
decision. The gap of the literature motivates this paper to empirically test a nonlinear
relationship between firm performance and the selection criteria in privatization. We
postulate that along the performance distribution, governments privatize better-performing
14
This relates to the recognized patterns that governments gaining popularity and voter goodwill in many other
countries in the wider literature of privatization (Szentpéteri and Telegdy, 2010; Dinc and Gupta, 2011).
15
In the last thirty years of economic reform, there has been a dramatic increase in the labour disputes; see more
figures and discussions in Gallagher (2005).
10
SOEs for demonstration effects and gain sales revenue, but only to a certain extent, and keep
the best performers fully state-owned, in order to achieve a higher productive efficiency and
minimize public discontent. The worst SOEs tend to remain state-owned, not only because
they are difficult to sell, but also because the sales revenue is not enough to compensate the
financial and political costs associated with selling them.
4. Data
We conduct the empirical analysis on the population of state-owned enterprises in China over
the period of 1998-2008 using the Annual Report of Industrial Enterprise Statistics compiled
by the National Statistical Bureau of China (NSB). There are several advantages of adopting
this dataset for our analysis compared to survey-type datasets typically used in the
privatization literature. First of all, the data contains the population of all SOEs and all abovescale non-SOEs over the decade.17 The rare comprehensive coverage across firms and over
time allows us to build a profile of the ownership changes that occurred over the examined
period that cannot be achieved by any survey data.
Second, the data record the main sources of firms’ equity capital stock, including state
budget, collective funds from the local government and communities, corporate funds from
the corporate sector and capital markets, bonds issued by individual enterprises, individual
borrowings, and investment from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan (HMT), as well as from
foreign investors. The detailed equity finance records allow us to monitor the changes in
firms’ ownership structure. Hence, not only are we able to observe dichotomous changes in
the nature of ownership, in the way that most existing studies do, but also quantify the
16
This may also stir up serious disgruntlement and patriotic movements among people. For example, in 2004,
there was an unprecedented nation-wide debate, well known in media as the ‘Lang-Gu Dispute’, on the losses of
national assets in the privatization process.
17
Above-scale refers to firms reaching the threshold of sales above 5 million RMB (roughly USD600,000).
11
magnitude of ownership structure and capture the staging and sequencing of the privatization,
reaching beyond the capacity of survey-type data or ownership registration data.
Meanwhile, as pointed out by Gupta et al. (2008), it is much more preferable to have
three-digit (or above) industrial level data to construct firms’ market share, industrial market
dynamics (entry and exit), and growth potential, which is rarely possible due to data
limitation. In our analysis, the available four-digit industrial classification allows us to
improve on this specification. Moreover, in order to determine the ways in which the market
environment affects the selection and sequencing in privatization that is vital, one needs data
with coverage of population or close to population. An advantage of this database over others
is that it maintains a unique enterprise identifier irrespective of the dynamics of ownership
change, so we are able to distinguish between genuine new entrants and existing firms
operating under a new ownership structure. The population of the SOEs and the
complementary data of above-scale non-state owned enterprises account for around 85-90%
of total output in most industrial sectors, which permits a well-representative description of
industrial dynamics.
The final data matrix is subject to careful cross check and cleaning. 18 We identified
47,498 SOEs over the period 1998 and 2008 that have the necessary information for the
econometric estimation. Table 2 shows the recent privatization profile of China constructed
by our data. The total number of fully state-owned firms decreases sharply from 34,078 in
1998 to 5,755 in 2008. This is consistent with recent evidence on the resulting reduction of
the state sector in the ownership reform (Gan et al., 2011). The identified privatization cases
18
The observations with negative or zero employment records were dropped, as were those with negative assets
and intermediate inputs. The variables of interest have been trimmed by 1% on each side of the distribution. We
excluded firms that amount to 1% of the sample that record flipping capital shares between state and non-state
owners, which might be due to miscoding, misreporting or, in the less likely cases, firms where the state
released ownership and regained it in a very short period for strange reasons. We only keep those SOEs that
were initially fully state-owned, and drop those that started with non-state ownership and became fully stateowned at some point in the period, although these cases are very few. The tobacco sector is excluded from the
analysis as privatization rarely occurs in such a highly state-monopolized sector.
12
range from 1,967 in 2009 to the lowest point in 2008, i.e. 376 cases.19 In light of the recent
debate on “The Private Retreats Market” (Xu, 2009), the decreasing trend seems also
consistent with the observation that privatization might have been intentionally slowed down.
What appears stable from these series is the high percentage of equity transfer to the nonstate sector in cases of privatization, which on average remains above 80% throughout the
decade. In the majority of cases, the capital transfer went above 50% to make up for a
majority of non-state firms, among which most cases were full privatization. Overall, 14% of
the deals can be classified as minority transfers which, on average, pass 22.9% of the state
share to private hands. The changing trends of both types of privatization can also be
observed from Figure 1.
[Table 2 is here] [Figure 1 is here]
Table 3 presents the descriptive statistics of the variables of interest. The most
noticeable observation is the much superior performance of the privatized firms compared to
the remaining SOEs. We also find the performance differences between minority and
majority privatization are less statistically significant. It is not clear from these statistics that
partially privatized firms are on average more productive (Li, 1997) or have better labour
quality (Amess et al., 2009). More SOEs are affiliated to central government in the majority
privatization cases than the remaining SOEs, showing that the enterprise reform has detached
a large number of SOEs from their central administration. We also observe that significantly
more SOEs in downstream industries are majority privatized than minority privatized. This
suggests that the state is likely to hold stakes and remain control in privatized firms in
upstream sectors.
[Table 3 is here]
19
Each case is a fully state-owned enterprise transferring the capital stake to private owners.
13
Next we take a closer look at the patterns of firm performance and privatization
revealed in the data. Figure 2 graphs the number of privatization cases in each of the
quantiles of the firm’s previous year performance based on the statistics of the raw data used.
Together with the added trendlines, these graphs highlight a quadratic or inverted-U or L
shaped relationship between the frequencies of privatization cases and firm performance, for
performance measures. There are less cases of privatization among the worst and the best
performers compared with the firms in the peak of the performance distribution.
[Figure 2 is here]
5. The Selection in Privatization
5.1. Model specification and estimation strategy
We start by considering firm privatization as a one-off event, similar to most studies in the
literature (e.g. Liu et al., 2007; Gupta et al., 2008; Szentpéteri and Telegdy, 2010).
Privatization is identified when a fully state-owned firm starts receiving non-state capital
share in equity, irrespective of the magnitude of privatization.20 Hence, a dichotomous
variable is constructed to capture ownership change, with a value equal to one when
privatization occurs, and zero if not. A Probit model is used to estimate the probability of a
firm being selected into privatization based on the pre-privatization characteristics. The
Probit equation takes the following form:
2
priv*it = a1' Xit-1 + a 2' X it-1
+ a3' LABit-1 + a 4' DEBTit-1 + a 5'CENTRALit-1
+ a 6'TURB jt-1 + a 7' DOWN j + a 8' Di + wit ;
privit =1[ priv*it > 0]
(1)
where ‘i’ indexes the individual firm, ‘j’ indexes the industrial sector, and ‘t’ indicates time.
A fully state-owned firm i is privatized if a latent index variable priv*it takes a value greater
14
than zero at time t. Our main interest is a set of variables that predict the key criteria of the
selection. In particular, firm performance indictors (X) and its quadratic term (X2) are
included to test the nonlinear relationship between firm performance and the selection in
privatization. We follow Gupta et al. (2008) to construct two productivity measures, (Q-W),
and (Q/L-W/L). (Q/W) is the difference between the value of total output (Q) and the total
wage bill (W), and (Q/L-W/L) is the difference between the value of the average product of
labour and the average wage, where L is employment. While these two output measures
underestimate the total cost, ignoring other inputs than labour, such as intermediate inputs,
the focus is directly on the relationship between revenues and labour costs. It also serves the
purpose of providing comparable results to the existing literature.21 Following our previous
discussion, we predict that the marginal effect of the performance measure gives us a positive
sign, while the quadratic term gives us a negative sign, which amounts to show an inverted-U
shaped relationship between firm performance with the probability of being selected in
privatization.
The variable LAB is labour cost or potential settlement costs, measured by average
wage per employee. According to the financial incentives of privatization, governments
should prioritize the SOEs that have higher settlement costs in privatization, to relieve the
financial burdens. DEBT stands for debt ratio and is measured by total loan over total assets.
Financial incentives may drive local governments and banks to sell SOEs with high debt,
although from the demand side, high-debt SOEs may not be popular among buyers.
The dummy variable of CENTRAL is coded one when an SOE is affiliated with the
central government, and zero otherwise. As previously discussed, the major players behind
20
This would also mean that only the first round of privatization is considered in the case of multiple rounds of
privatization of the same firm.
21
It is worth mentioning that we do not employ accounting profit for several reasons. In our sample, a
considerable amount of SOEs are loss-making, which renders profitability negative. In addition, when the losses
of Chinese SOEs were often directly due to the function of maintaining employment and engaging in command
production, rather than the productive operation, it would be known to the buyers and hence, be likely to be
15
the privatization policy are local governments, especially those at the municipal and county
levels (Liu et al., 2007; Garnaut et al., 2005). Local governments are less likely to be able to
influence the divestment of central government affiliated firms, and hardly benefit from
selling them. Hence, the prediction is that centrally affiliated SOEs are less likely to be
privatized or will be privatized later than others, ceteris paribus.
TURB is a sector variable of industrial turbulence, which is the total rate of industrial
entry and exit in each three-digit industrial sector for each region from year t-1 to t as
suggested by Beesley and Hamilton (1984).22 Large-scale simultaneous entry and exit in an
industry can be taken as an indication of low sunk costs as in the traditional empirical
industrial organization literature. In the Chinese context, we postulate that a high rate of entry
and exit may indicate that a sector starts embracing the market by opening to more private
entrepreneurs, as lively dynamics may mean plentiful business opportunities. Consequently,
we expect to see a positive sign of the privatization selection effect.
A dummy variable DOWN is specified in the model, following Glaeser and
Scheinkman (1996) and Gupta et al. (2008), to test if downstream industries are prioritised in
privatization. The theory contends that private ownership has the prime advantage of
responding to demand shock and input cost volatility over the state sector, while state
companies tend to ignore such signals due to political interference, soft budget constraints,
weak managerial incentives for gathering information, and an effective market monitoring
device. Thus downstream sectors are hypothesized more efficient and beneficial from the
increased responsiveness to information about demand conditions after privatization. These
sectors are defined to include food, textiles, leather, footwear, paper, publishing, electronic
taken into account when considering the acquisition. Therefore, profitability may not be the primary selection
criteria in privatization. Furthermore, it is often subject to reporting errors (Gupta et al., 2008).
22
Entry and exit rates are identified with the information on firm establishment dates and their presence in the
dataset. For each year t (t=1999,…,2007), an entry (exit) rate can be calculated by the ratio of entry (exit)
incidences in year t over total firm numbers in year t-1 of each three-digit industrial sector for each region.
TURB is the sum of the entry rate and exit rate.
16
machinery and equipment, and transportation sectors. We summarize the hypotheses and the
proxy variables used in the analysis in Table 4.
[Table 4 is here]
Finally, Di is a set of time, industrial sector and regional dummies. The disturbances
ωit follow a standard normal distribution. The Probit model is estimated by a maximum
likelihood function, with firm being a clustered residual to correct for heteroskedasticity.
We employ several specification tests to verify the appropriateness of our modelling
approach. First of all, aside from the individual statistical significance of the quadratic term
of firm performance, we also test joint significance of the linear and quadratic term of
performance using the Wald statistics.
Second, in order to capture firm performance and characteristics prior to the selection,
we lag all explanatory variables by one year. This is to deal with some of the unobserved
heterogeneity that correlates with firm performance and determines the selection.23 We
further test the potential endogeneity designed for a Probit equation with potential continuous
endogenous variables using a simple two-step test due to Rivers and Vuong (1988,
henceforth RV). The first-stage equation for each firm performance variable involves its
lagged value and all other lagged explanatory variables in the selection equation; and in the
second stage, the residual estimated from the first stage is included in the baseline selection
model. A joint statistical significance of firm performance variables and the predicted
residual indicates the presence of likely endogeneity.24
In nonlinear regression models such as a Probit model, the intuition about the
coefficients of the interaction terms differs from linear models. The marginal effects of the
23
If firms have knowledge of their odds of being selected to privatize, an endogeneity problem would exis, as
long as the knowledge of being selected leads to corresponding actions to prepare for the future selection.
24
Given RV test is a limited information procedure, we also tried a Maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) test
(Wooldridge, 2005), which is a full information and more efficient procedure. It invokes a simultaneous
estimation of our baseline selection equation, while firm performance determines the equation with a similar
17
changes in the interacted variables, in our case squared terms, are not equal to the magnitudes
of changes in the interaction terms. The usual inferences, such as those based on z-statistics
and odds-ratio interpretation, cannot be used (Norton et al., 2004). Instead, we calculate the
marginal effects based on the predicted probability difference with and without including the
interaction terms, and calculate the standard errors by applying the Delta method in a similar
approach as that of Ai and Norton (2003).
5.2. Results
Table 4 reports the results of the selection equation estimates, with columns (1)-(2) reporting
the estimates of the baseline model as in Equation (1). Figure 3 illustrates the results. The RV
and MLE tests give no evidence of the endogeneity in either models. The marginal effect
estimates of the selection criteria show that our productive efficiency measures, together with
their quadratic terms, all yield a statistically significant inverted U-shape relationship
between the probabilities of privatization and firm productive efficiency. Compared to the
firms located in the middle of the productive efficiency distribution, the worst and the best
performing firms are less likely to be privatized. Relative to the least performing firms, better
performance makes SOEs more likely to be selected in privatization, but only to a certain
point. Then, the likelihood of privatization diminishes. Put differently, the worse and the best
firms have stronger tendeny to remain state-owned. It is notable that the evidence for the top
end of the distribution is less strong compared to the low end of the invested-U shape.
We calculate the turning point of the inverted-U shape employing the algorithm due
to Thori and Mehlum (2010) designed for nonlinear relationship and 95% of Fieller
confidence intervals. Further comparing the sample distribution with the predicted turning
points, we find that overall majority of the firms are located on the left-hand side of the
turning points, and there are only a small number of firms that are located on the right-hand
specification to the one used in the VR test. A statistically significant joint distribution of the two residuals
18
side of the turning points. However, given that they are at the very top of the scale in
performance, their presence is still significant. Our results indicate that Chinese local
governments are likely to treat the very best firms differently from the rest, less than 5% on
the top, in the process of a decade of privatization.
Our independent variables come up with hypothesized signs and consistent estimates.
Labour settlement costs, LAB, yield statistically significant positive signs. This is consistent
with the hypothesis that governments minimizing compensation and settlement costs
associated with failing SOEs, and hence SOEs with higher labour cost, are more likely to be
selected in privatization, all else being equal.
DOWN all have positive and significant signs, as predicted by theory. Firms located in
downstream industries are more likely to first be selected into privatization. It seems that the
practice of privatizing sectors in China is common with that in the Czech Republic (Gupta et
al., 2008) which allows flexible management and absorbs a more advanced management
practice.
The marginal effects of CENTRAL are consistently negative and statistically
significant across all model specifications. Firms affiliated to the central governments are less
likely to be involved in privatization, as expected. We did not find any significant estimates
of DEBT, debt ratio, across model specifications, which suggests that overall debt ratio is not
a good predictor of the privatization selection decision from the point of view of governments
over the period examined.
Industrial turbulence, TURB, has significant positive signs in most specifications, as
expected. Firms are more likely to be privatized in an industrial sector and regions where
market is not only more lively and open to investors, but also functions more effectively, in
terms of its allowing creative destruction.
would indicate potential endogeneity.
19
[Table 5 here] [Figure 3 here]
6. The staging in privatization
Although the above Probit analysis has good properties and is easy to estimate and interpret,
a dummy variable of privatization is unable to capture additional information on
privatization, such as the staging, or the magnitude, of the privatization. The approach of
treating all ownership transfers as equal, as is adopted in a majority of the existing studies,
ignores the stage of privatization at which firms may be, and assumes that the selection
criteria into privatization for a 10% state transfer into private hands, for example, are the
same for a 90% transfer. Hence we construct a measure of the percentage of equity capital
transferred from a full SOE to the private sector, and estimate the following Tobit equation:
2
priv _ shit* = b1' Xit-1 + b2' X it-1
+ b3' LABit-1 + b 4' DEBTit-1 + b5'CENTRALit-1
+ b6'TURB jt-1 + b7' DOWN j + b 8' Di + wit .
priv _ shit = max[0, priv _ shit* ]
(2)
where priv _ shit* is the latent variable of the percentage of ownership transferred from the
state to the non-state sector, and only observable when it is greater than zero. The other
notations remain the same with the selection model (1). ωit has a standard normal
distribution. The Tobit model is estimated by a maximum likelihood function, with all
regressors being lagged one year, and a firm-clustered residual to correct for
heteroskedasticity. Similar to the Probit model, the marginal effects are calculated based on
the difference in the predicted probability with and without including the interaction term,
with the standard errors calculated by applying the Delta method.
Table 6 Column (1)-(2) reports the estimates of the marginal effects of the
determinants of the magnitude of privatization by the Tobit equation (3). The predicted signs
of the productive efficiency measures are consistent with our hypotheses and the estimates of
20
the selection model. We find a statistically significant inverted U-shape between the extent of
privatizations and firm performance. This means that the worst and the best performing firms
tend to convert less capital stake to private hands, conditional on being selected into
privatization, compared to the firms in the middle. A higher extent of privatization is
associated with better performance, but only to a certain point, and after that the magnitudes
of privatization start to decrease. Again, the evidence for the top end of the distribution is less
strong compared to the low end of the invested-U shape. This result echoes the finding in the
Probit equation, and indicates that not only the worse and the best firms tend to be left behind
in privatization; when they are selected, they also tend to be privatized to a less extent.
A potential drawback of the static model of privatization determinants is its inability
to account for a firm’s past privatizing experience, as some SOEs do take steps to privatize
their ownership. The fact that an SOE already has private shareholders may affect the
possibility of further transfer of its state share. It may encourage an SOE to further
privatization if it is more open to a competitive market. On the other hand, it may also be that
the governments wish to hold on to the existing shares and prefer not to privatize further. In
either way, such a static model does not incorporate the dynamic nature of the staging of
privatization. We apply the consistent dynamic Tobit estimator proposed by Wooldridge
(2005) to deal with path dependence, which deals with the initial condition problem.25
Table 6 Column (3)-(4) shows the estimation results. After controlling for the past
privatization experience, the results of the performance variables are qualitatively unchanged.
The evidence confirms an inverted U-shape between the extent of privatization with firm
performance and the worst and the best firms tend to experience less private capital
conversion, as compared to the firms in the middle.
25
The interpretation of the coefficients is slightly different and perhaps more desirable: controlling for the past
privatization experience, how the extent of privatization is determined. See more details of the application and
the model specifications in the supplementary material of the paper, and available under request.
21
It is worth mentioning that once firm-specific time average covariates are included in
the dynamic panel estimation, the lagged firm labour cost stops being a statistically
significant explanatory variable, while the average labour cost level is positive and
significant. The essence of the interpretation remains the same in that governments prefer
shifting the financial burden, due to the SOEs’ higher settlement costs, into private hands, all
else being equal. The estimates of other variables are largely consistent with the previous
results.
[Table 6 is here]
7. The sequencing in privatization – time to event analysis
Some may argue that firm privatization is not a decision made at the time of the privatization;
it is a latent accumulated status change. The time that an SOE takes to get “ready” to be
privatized reflects the sequencing in privatization. Time elements, more exactly, the
unobserved heterogeneity associated with time, not only determine which firms are
privatized, but also which firms are privatized earlier.26 A major advantage of utilizing
survival analysis in this context is that time elements, such as economic environment and
changing privatization policy, can be taken into account in the modelling of event occurrence.
We employ a Cox regression with continuous time-varying covariates to model the
probability of a firm being privatized using a hazard rate specification. The hazard rate or the
probability of privatization for firm i in period t conditional on having remained state-owned
up to that point, is denoted as h(t | S ) is given by
2
h(t) = h0 (t)exp( c1 Xit-1 + c 2' X it-1
+ c 3' LABit-1 + c 4' DEBTit-1 + c 5'CENTRALit-1
+ c 6'TURB jt-1 + c 7' DOWN j + c 8' Di )
26
(4)
Time to event analysis, also known as survival modelling, has also been widely used in the social science
research where the interest is in analysing time to events such as job changes or firm exit while in our case, it is
appropriate to analyse the time to the event of privatization.
22
where h0(t) is the baseline hazard, and the regressors have the same notation as before. The
only difference from the previous specifications is that DOWN and D are time invariant, and
D only includes regional and industrial sector dummies; the rest are time-varying covariates
and lagged variables are specified in the model. We choose a flexible specification for the
baseline hazard and employ the Cox proportional hazard model, which imposes a
proportional characteristic-specific shift in the baseline hazard.
A source of concern in the estimation of hazard models is the issue of unobserved
heterogeneity. As shown by Lancaster (1990), unobserved heterogeneity, if neglected, would
bias the proportionate response of the hazard to variation in each regressor at any survival
time. For this reason, we estimate the hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity that
follows a gamma distribution. Once more, for such a nonlinear model, we calculate the
marginal effects based on the predicted probability difference with and without including the
interaction term, and calculate the standard errors by applying the Delta method.
We find that the coefficients on the control variables of the hazard model are broadly
consistent with the expectations and hence, we focus on the performance variables. The
results are in line with our previous finding, and offer insights into the sequencing in
privatization. We find a statistically significant inverted U-shape between the sequencing in
privatization and firm performance. This means that the worst and the best performing firms
are less likely to be privatized either in the initial period of reform or much later towards the
end, as compared to the firms in the middle of the distribution. After the initial period, better
performing SOEs are more likely to privatize earlier, to a certain point, and then they become
less likely to be privatized as time goes by.
[Table 7 here]
Taken together, these results suggest that not only does the firm located at the two
ends of the performance distribution tend to be left behind in privatization, and be privatized
23
to a less extent when they are selected; they are also less likely to be privatized in later years
when the overall economic conditions grew favourable. Related to the fact that the Chinese
privatization was the government’s desperate measure in a desperate situation at an earlier
stage, this result demonstrates an undocumented yet clear change in the privatization policy
over the last decade.
We further test the sensitivity of using alternative measures of firm productive
efficiency, with one being an internal measure of performance, firm total factor productivity
(TFP) and the other an external measure of performance, market share. Our main results are
qualitatively the same, both before and after dealing with the endogeneity issue.27
8. Conclusions
More than a decade has passed since the start of privatization in China. Although the state
ownership of the economy has been considerably reduced, the state sector remains large, and
the process of privatization is far from completion. Based on the observations of Chinese
state-owned enterprises over the last decade (1998-2008), our analysis on the selection,
staging and sequencing of privatization shows that the process is complex, and government
decisions are not driven by a single motive, but reflect an overall balancing action between
economic, financial and political objectives.
Our results indicate that in the recent Chinese privatization, firm performance in
productive efficiency relates to the selection, staging and sequencing in privatization in an
inverted-U fashion. The worse and the best performing SOEs tend to remain in the state
sector, and maintain a higher state holding when they are selected for privatization. These
firms are also less likely to be privatized later in time, given all other conditions being equal.
27
The analysis adopts Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) approach and the Wooldridge-Levinsohn-Petrin (2009)
estimators to estimate TFP in each of the NACE two-digit industrial sectors , and measure firm’s market share
in the three-digit SIC industry in each province as a proxy for realised profitability. While these measures
deliver qualitatively the same results, there is a difference in resulting different turning points of the inverted-U
24
The selection patterns and the changing privatization policy over the last decade identified in
this paper describe the slowdown of the privatization reform. This also indicates “the State
advances and the Private retreats”, and mirrors the recent prevailing message in the media of
revising state-directed capitalism and its rising power in emerging economies. In the ongoing debate on the pros and cons of Western liberal capitalism versus a rise of state
capitalism, a promising revenue for future research would be to investigate the consequence
of such a changing policy in the Chinese economy, not only for the directly affected state
sector but, more importantly, for the resource-starved and challenge-surrounded private
companies.
There are a number of future research avenues in the privatization literature. One of
the most challenging tasks is to address the theoretical inadequacy in modelling the
complicated process of selection and the dynamics in this process. To model the privatization
process more realistically, not only governments’ payoff is relevant, but also the market
forces and the stakeholders in the SOEs such as mangers and employees. A lot more work is
needed to gain a better understanding of the regularity we find in this paper, especially
through theoretical development. In addition, we need to revisit the previous assessed results
on the privatization that have not taken into consideration of the selectivity issues adequately.
Did the privatized SOEs achieve desired outcome and how does the selection that was
dictated by local governments affect the privatization? Much is to be learned, not only to
enhance our knowledge on privatization but more importantly to help drawing lessons and
implications on the eve when China kicks off new rounds of privatization.28
shape between internal and external performance measures. All additional results and our interpretations are
available under request. They are also available in the longer version of this paper.
28
See many anecdotal reports on the new reforms directions in China following the Third Plenum of the
Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Congress, e.g. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ec28674c-13ac-11e4-84b700144feabdc0.html#axzz3EVcFZM2F.
25
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28
Tables and Figures
Table 1:Loss-making SOEs in China: 1994-1997
Year
Total loss of lossmaking SOEs
Total profit of profitable
SOEs
The number of industrial
sectors in which SOEs are
loss-making on average
Billion RMB Yuan
Billion RMB Yuan
1994
48.3
82.9
13
1995
63.9
66.5
16
1996
79.0
41.3
21
1997
83.1
42.8
25
Note: The exchange rate between RMB Yuan with USD during this period was around 8:1.
Source: A Chronicle History of the Chinese State-owned Enterprises Reform, by Dicheng and Zhang (2006), page 403.
Table 2: Privatization profile of China: 1998-2008
Privatization cases
All
Year
Total number of
privatization
events
Non-state
equity capital
increase
among
privatized
firms
No. of majority
privatization
(Non-state
share≥50%)
Total number of
fully SOEs
Among all
Non-state
equity capital
increase No. of minority
among
privatization
privatized
(non-state
firms
share<50%)
Non-state
equity capital
increase
among
privatized
firms
1998
34,078
0
0
0
0
0
0
1999
27,523
1,967
80.4%
1,553
95.8%
414
22.7%
2000
23,239
1,619
83.1%
1,331
96.2%
288
22.4%
2001
19,251
1,116
84.2%
932
96.2%
184
23.2%
2002
16,601
1,049
85.2%
883
97.0%
166
22.3%
2003
13,428
975
89.0%
861
97.6%
114
23.6%
29
2004
13,644
682
92.3%
627
98.2%
55
25.4%
2005
9,584
708
92.9%
664
97.5%
44
24.1%
2006
8,574
475
94.0%
449
98.3%
26
20.5%
2007
6,912
392
90.9%
355
97.8%
37
24.3%
2008
5,755
376
93.5%
349
98.9%
27
24.3%
Total
178,589
9,359
86.2%
8,004
96.9%
1,355
22.9%
Note: The figures reported in the table are based on the authors' own calculation using the cleaned panel datasets compiled based on the NBS Annual
Report of Industrial Enterprise Statistics data over 1998-2008. The figures also correspond to Figure 1.
30
Table 3: Summary statistics of the data
All
I. SOEs
II. Minority privatized
SOEs
III. Majority privatized SOEs
Firms privatized with
minority private share
(<50%)
Firms privatized with minority private
share (≥50%)
Mean
Firms
remain
stateowned
Mean
Mean
SD
SD
SD
All
firms
Mean
difference (I
vs II)
Mean
SD
Mean
difference (I
vs III)
Mean
difference
(II vs III)
-9.400***
2.097**
-19.334***
-1.405
-22.749***
2.480**
-7.226***
1.567
-6.224***
-1.802*
8.901***
-0.559
9.807***
-5.170***
-0.655
-0.839
-13.009***
-4.293***
Performance
Q-W
Q/L-W/L
TFP
Market share
0.465
0.338
0.654
1.353
1.164
1.484
0.118
0.093
0.135
0.197
0.170
0.196
5.875
5.517
6.439
1.668
1.684
1.484
0.176
0.155
0.214
0.287
0.276
0.301
2.010
1.892
2.081
0.912
0.943
0.801
0.775
0.796
0.740
0.414
0.438
0.347
0.081
0.076
0.056
0.272
0.265
0.229
0.128
0.126
0.128
0.069
0.070
0.069
0.211
0.201
0.206
0.408
96128
(100%)
47498
(100%)
0.401
54605
(56.8%)
38180
(80.4%)
0.405
-5.996***
0.718
1.649
-6.812***
0.172
0.235
-11.297***
6.563
1.400
-4.566***
0.218
0.302
Other variables
LAB
DEBT
CENTRAL
TURB
DOWN
Obs(#)
(% in total)
Firm (#)
(% in total)
-0.821
2.258
0.797
3.776***
0.733
0.358
8.460***
0.093
0.291
0.585
0.132
0.066
-0.903
0.232
0.422
9378 (9.8%)
32145 (33.4%)
2148 (4.5%)
7170 (15.1%)
Variable definitions: (Q/W) is the difference between the value of total output (Q) and the total wage bill
(W), and (Q/L-W/L) is the difference between the value of the average product of labour and the average
wage, where L is employment. TFP is total factor productivity, estimated using Levinsohn and Petrin
(2003) approach in each of the NACE two-digit industrial sectors. Market share measures firm’s market
share in the three-digit SIC industry in each province as a proxy for realised profitability. LAB is labour
cost or potential settlement costs, measured by average wage per employee. DEBT stands for debt ratio
and is measured by total loan over total assets. CENTRAL is dummy with value one when an SOE is
affiliated with the central government, and zero otherwise. TURB is a sector variable of industrial
turbulence, which is the total rate of industrial entry and exit in each three-digit industrial sector for each
region from year t-1 to t. Down is a dummy variable capturing the sectors of food, textiles, leather,
footwear, paper, publishing, electronic machinery and equipment, and transportation sectors.
Note: This table describes the statistical characteristics of the data, and in particular shows the statistical
differences between the firms that remain SOEs and the privatized firms in terms of firm performance and
other characteristics. The means and standard errors together with pairwised mean difference tests and
their statistical significance using t-test are reported in this table between three groups of the firms: I.
SOEs, II. Minority privatized firms and III. Majority privatized firms, *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.
31
Table 4: Theoretical predictions of the privatization models
Theory
Rationale
Selection
criteria
Proxy/Variable
Economic factors
(1) Maximizing economic efficiency (oE)
Governments maximizing economic efficiency should privatize less
profitable, loss-making and less efficient SOEs. Efficiency considerations
may also dictate the shutting down of unviable firms.
Firm performance
-
(2) Maximizing efficiency through
information gain (oI)
Privatization should begin where demand or cost volatility is the greatest
and where it maximizes the information flow.
Downstream sector
+
(3) Competition effects
Privatization is prioritized in the sectors that are more competitive.
Turbulence
+
Governments maximizing their revenue should keep the best SOEs (as stateowned) and retain the profit from them.
Governments maximizing their revenue should privatize the worst SOEs
and hope that they perform better in private hands. The revenue through
taxes is the same, irrespective of ownership.
Firm performance
-
Employees' settlement
costs; total wage and
benefit
+
Firm performance
-
Debt
+
Financial factors
(4) Maximizing indirect revenue through tax
and other income (oR)
(5) Minimizing compensation and settlement
costs (oL)
(6) Maximizing debt relief (oD)
Governments minimizing revenue should privatize SOEs with higher
settlement costs to relieve the financial burden.
Governments maximizing debt relief should private SOEs that are lossmaking and with a higher debt level, which will also help banks relieve nonperforming loans to SOEs.
Political factors
(7) Minimizing demonstration effects (oDM)
Governments maximizing the chance to achieve demonstration effects to
investors on reform resolution, reform outcome and sound investment
environment, to attract FDI and enhance regional competiveness.
Firm performance
+
(8) Minimizing political risk (oRK)
Governments minimize political risk of receiving public accusation of
selling off public assets and social discontent, which would endanger their
chance of career progression.
Firm performance
-
(9) Maintaining central control (oP)
SOEs affiliated with the central government are less likely to be privatized,
or will be privatized later
Central government
affiliation
-
32
Table 5: Selection in the recent Chinese privatization
VARIABLES
LABi,t-1
(1)
0.0118***
(2)
0.00963***
DEBTi,t-1
(0.00106)
0.000321
(0.00106)
0.00155
TURB j,t-1
(0.00199)
0.0440**
(0.00198)
0.0217
DOWN j,t-1
(0.0194)
0.0152***
(0.0200)
0.0150***
CENTRALi,t-1
(0.00231)
-0.0096***
(0.00230)
-0.00612**
(0.00248)
(0.00251)
Performance measure X
(Q-W) i,t-1
0.0306***
(0.00227)
-0.0057***
(0.000485)
(Q-W) i,t-12
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-1
0.231***
(0.0129)
-0.238***
(0.0170)
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-12
Specification tests
MLE test for exogeneity of X through Ho: ρu,v = 0; asymptotic t test
2 , p-value
for Pr ob > c (1)
0.40
0.370
2
2 , p-value
RV test for exogeneity of X; Wald test c (1)
(Pr ob > c (1)
)
0.81
0.74
0.000
0.000
0.000/0.000
0.000/0.000
2.75
(2.63 2.90)
0.49
(0.47 0.52)
[96.7%, 3.3%]
[96%, 4%]
Inverted-U
Exclusion restriction test on X and X2: Wald test for joint
2
2 , p-value
significance; c (1)
(Pr ob > c (1)
)
Sasabuchi-test of inverse U-shape in X (p-value), lower bound/upper
bound
Estimated turning point
Bounds of 95% Fieller interval
Percentages of firms fall in each side of the turning points [left, right]
Observations
131,480
Note 1: This table presents the marginal effect estimates of privatization selection models for the Probit
model. The dependent variable is a dichotomous variable constructed to capture the privatization, with a
value equal to one when a fully state-owned enterprise starts receiving a private share in equity, and 0 if
not.
Note 2: All estimations include the full sets of industry, time and regional dummies, all of which are
jointly significant in all specifications.
Note 3: The marginal effects of the interaction terms are calculated based on the predicted probability
difference with and without including the interaction term, and the standard errors are calculated by
applying the Delta method in a similar approach as in Ai and Norton (2003).
Note 4: For an explanation of the Sasabuchi-test and the Fieller interval see Section 4.2. The percentages
of the firm that fall in each side of the turning points are calculated based on the previous year
observations and only restricted to SOEs.
Note 5: Standard errors corrected for clustering by firms are in parentheses. *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, *
p<0.1.
33
Table 6: Staging in the recent Chinese privatization
Baseline equation
VARIABLES
LABi,t-1
DEBTi,t-1
TURB j,t-1
DOWN j,t-1
CENTRALi,t-1
(1)
0.0102***
(0.000939)
0.00122
(0.00176)
0.0380**
(0.0166)
0.0144***
(0.00194)
-0.0116***
(0.00253)
(2)
0.00740***
(0.000928)
0.00264
(0.00175)
0.0164
(0.0170)
0.0141***
(0.00192)
-0.00936***
(0.00250)
Dynamic panel probit model additional
variables
Priv_sh
-0.00612*
(0.00368)
-0.0644***
(0.00396)
0.00505***
(0.00170)
0.0130***
(0.00197)
-0.0374***
(0.00452)
-0.346***
(0.0338)
i,t-1
Priv_shi,1
Xi
LABi
DEBTi
TURB j
Performance measure X
(Q-W) i,t-1
(Q-W) i,t-12
0.0222***
(0.00209)
-0.00418***
(0.000448)
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-1
32.08
(0.000)
RV test for exogeneity of X; Wald test
0.33
2
2
(0.56)
c (1)
(Pr ob > c (1)
)
MLE test for exogeneity of X through Ho:
0.805
2
(0.28)
ρu,v = 0; asymptotic t test for Pr ob > c (1)
Observations
124,189
Note 1: The presented estimates in the table Column (1)-(2)
-0.00773**
(0.00365)
-0.0679***
(0.00393)
0.0805***
(0.00936)
0.00959***
(0.00199)
-0.0376***
(0.00449)
-0.419***
(0.0341)
0.0174***
(0.00268)
-0.00407***
(0.000425)
0.211***
(0.0114)
-0.219***
(0.0150)
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-12
Specification tests
Exclusion restriction test on X and X2: Wald
2
2
test for joint significance; c (1)
(Pr ob > c (1)
)
Robustness check: dynamic
model
(3)
(4)
5.29e-05
0.000475
(0.00157)
(0.00159)
0.0306***
0.0316***
(0.00375)
(0.00373)
0.121***
0.119***
(0.0191)
(0.0192)
0.0107***
0.0107***
(0.00216)
(0.00214)
-0.0143***
-0.0119***
(0.00274)
(0.00270)
0.103***
(0.0152)
-0.159***
(0.0160)
61.43
(0.000)
3.11
(0.08)
-0.157
(0.398)
124,189
87,870
87,870
are by Tobit estimation as in equation (2) and
Column (3)-(4) are for the dynamic panel Tobit model (Wooldridge, 2005) as in equation (3). The dependent variable
Δnsoe_sh is the change of the share of non-state equity capital in year t and t-1, Δnsoe_sh Î (0,1), which
indicates the extent in privatization.
Note 2: The marginal effects of the interaction terms in these columns are calculated based on the predicted
probability difference with and without including the interaction term, and the standard errors are calculated
by applying the Delta method in approaches similar to Ai and Norton (2003).
Note 3: All estimations include the full sets of industry, time and regional dummies, all of which are jointly
significant in all specifications. Note 5: Standard errors corrected for clustering by firms are in parentheses.
*** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1.
34
Table 7: Sequencing in the recent Chinese privatization
VARIABLES
LABi,t-1
(1)
0.951*
(2)
0.963
DEBTi,t-1
(0.0254)
1.359
(0.0254)
0.954
TURB j,t-1
(0.324)
0.776***
(0.245)
0.808***
DOWN j,t-1
(0.0305)
1.249***
(0.0314)
1.252***
CENTRALi,t-1
(0.0391)
1.181***
(0.0393)
1.142***
(0.0170)
(0.0161)
Performance measure X
(Q-W) i,t-1
1.734***
(0.0590)
0.901***
(0.00684)
(Q-W) i,t-12
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-1
44.87***
(7.704)
(Q/L-W/L) i,t-12
0.0195***
(0.00454)
Observations
106,218
106,218
Note 1: This table presents the estimates of the Cox regression as in equation (4) with
continuous time-varying covariates to model the probability of a firm being privatized.
The dependent variable is a dichotomous variable constructed to capture the
privatization, with a value equal to one when a fully state-owned enterprise starts
receiving private shares in equity, and 0 if not.
Note 2: All estimations include the full sets of industry, time and regional dummies, all
of which are jointly significant in all specifications.
Note 3: Standard errors corrected for clustering by firms are in parentheses. *** p<0.01,
** p<0.05, * p<0.1.
35
Figure 1: Privatization profile in China, 1998-2008
Source: The authors’ calculation based on the NBS database.
36
Figure 2: Descriptive Statistics of patterns of privatization and firm performance
Note: This figure graphs the number of privatization cases in each of the performance quantiles (total 200
quantiles) based on the statistics of the raw data used in the analysis. The trendlines are produced as a fitted
quadratic relationship between the frequencies of privatization cases in each quantile of performance measure and
firm performance quantile. For both performance measures (Q-W) and (Q/L-W/L), the graphs show an inverted-U
shape between the frequencies of privatization and the performance distribution. There are less cases of
privatization among the worst and the best performers compared with the firms in the middle.
37
Figure 3: Predicted Inverted-U: probability of privatization and firm performance
Note: This figure shows the predicted margin effects of firm performance measures on the
likelihood of being privatized, based on the estimation results reported in Table 4.
38