IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/jet/dpaper/dpaper64.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Explaining the Persistence of State-ownership in China

Author

Listed:
  • Imai, Ken'ichi

Abstract

In the recent decade China witnessed an upsurge of privatization of small and medium state-owned enterprises (SOEs). In contrast to the consequent sharp reduction in the number of firms, however, the estimated share of broadly-defined SOEs that includes limited liabilities companies controlled by the State has shown virtually no sign of decline. We explain the backgrounds of this seemingly paradoxical persistence of state-ownership by looking into two distinctive types of large SOEs: traditional SOEs that remain dominant in oligopolistic industries and manager-controlled SOEs surviving in competitive industries. The two types exemplify several factors constraining further progress of SOE reform such as, financing the costs of restructuring, redefining the role of the State as the single dominant shareholder, and balancing the interests of the State and managers as entrepreneurs. Sorting these issues out will take time, which means that instabilities associated with state corporate ownership will remain in place in the foreseeable future in China.

Suggested Citation

  • Imai, Ken'ichi, 2006. "Explaining the Persistence of State-ownership in China," IDE Discussion Papers 64, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).
  • Handle: RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper64
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ir.ide.go.jp/?action=repository_action_common_download&item_id=38102&item_no=1&attribute_id=22&file_no=1
    File Function: First version, 2006
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Mattlin, Mikael, 2007. "The Chinese government's new approach to ownership and financial control of strategic state-owned enterprises," BOFIT Discussion Papers 10/2007, Bank of Finland Institute for Emerging Economies (BOFIT).
    2. Mattlin, Mikael, 2007. "The Chinese government's new approach to ownership and financial control of strategic state-owned enterprises," BOFIT Discussion Papers 10/2007, Bank of Finland, Institute for Economies in Transition.
    3. Tong, Sarah Y., 2009. "Why privatize or why not? Empirical evidence from China's SOEs reform," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 402-413, September.
    4. repec:zbw:bofitp:2007_010 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Gao, Song, 2010. "Impacts of Restructurings on Manufacturing Productive Efficiency: Evidence from China," MPRA Paper 24766, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Imai, Ken'ichi & Shiu, Jingming, 2007. "A Divergent Path of Industrial Upgrading: Emergence and Evolution of the Mobile Handset Industry in China," IDE Discussion Papers 125, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization(JETRO).

    More about this item

    Keywords

    State-owned enterprise; Corporate governance; China’s economic reform; Public enterprises; Small and medium-scale enterprises; Industrial management; China; 国有企業; 経済改革; コーポレートガバナンス; 公企業; 中小企業; 企業経営; 中国;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • L29 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Other
    • L32 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Public Enterprises; Public-Private Enterprises
    • P26 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist and Transition Economies - - - Property Rights

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:jet:dpaper:dpaper64. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Michitaka Imamitsu (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/idegvjp.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.