外资进入提高了中国城镇水务部门的绩效吗?——基于“准自然实验”方法

Dose the Foreign Investment Improve the Performance of the Water Sectors in China?——Based on the Quasi Natural Experiments

本文的目的是评估外资进入对中国城镇水务产业的影响。文章在梳理外资进入中国城镇水务的发展进程基础上,以非上市公司企业数据库(1998-2008)为样本,采用了双重差分的方法研究了外资进入对水务部门所形成的企业示范效应、行业市场效应和城市发展效应。实证结果表明外资进入存在一定的企业成本下降的示范作用,市场效率的改善作用,城市供水能力和城市用水效率的提高作用;但城市发展效应影响有限,短期内未发现其与水价波动具有统计意义的因果关系,也没有发现外资进入后市场势力迅速提高。

The purpose of the paper is to assess the role of foreign investment in China＇s urban water sector.Based on the development process of foreign investment into China＇s urban water,with the sample of a non- listed companies database（1998-2008）,we use Difference-in-Difference model in order to study the ＂demonstration effect＂, ＂market effect＂ and ＂development effects＂ of FI in the water sector.The empirical results show that FI can reduce production costs,improve market efficiency,and enhance urban water supply capacity and urban water use efficiency.In the short term,it has not found a statistically significant causal relationship with fluctuations in the price of water and it also did not appear rapid increase of market power after FI.