地方国企依赖、资源配置效率改善与供给侧改革

Does Reliance on SOEs Hamper the Improvement of Resource Allocation Efficiency?

本文研究地方国有企业依赖与资源配置效率改善的关系,并探究这种关系背后的作用机制及其对供给侧结构性改革的影响。基准检验表明地方国企依赖与资源配置效率改善之间存在显著的负相关;以"一五"项目落地情况作为地方国企依赖的工具变量,再运用纺织部和化学工业部撤部的外生政策变化做倍差法(DD)和三重差分(DDD)检验,结论稳健。进一步的机制检验发现,地方国企依赖越严重的地方,在位非国有企业越难获得资源扩大生产规模,新进入企业面临越高的进入门槛,低效率的国有企业越不容易退出市场。最后,基于反事实分析发现,如果能有效缓解地方国有企业过度依赖问题,提高国企资源使用效率,样本行业工业总产值将提升9.7%,就业将增加11.2%。

China s economy has achieved great success over the past three decades,which is mostly attributed to the opening-up policy and competition among local governments.Past economic development was characterized by extensive growth,driven by the expansion of the quantity of inputs to increase the quantity of outputs with limited technological improvement.However,with the growing economic scale,the rise in labor costs and the increasing scarcity of resources,the methods of the past are unable to sustain steady growth in the economy.Although modern economic theories state that technological improvement measured by total factor productivity(TFP)is the only key to the stable growth of the economy in the long run,the literature finds that Chinese firms have lower TFP and resource allocation efficiency compared to developed countries(Hsieh&Klenow,2009).Excessive competition between local governments and protective policies on behalf of state-owned enterprises(SOEs)are the main factors that disrupt the increase of TFP and distort resource allocation(Young,2000;Poncet,2003;Lardy,2014;Wei et al.,2017).With the diverse social functions of employment and stability,SOEs have long been an important means by which central and local governments participate in the market,which has resulted in a market-oriented reform of SOEs that is far from complete.A large number of inefficient SOEs still operate with low loans rates and high subsidies even though they have sustained long-term losses.This non-marketization mechanism impedes the free flow of the factors of production,resulting in a serious resource mismatch among industries,regions and enterprises(Hsieh&Klenow,2009;Nie&Jia,2011).We believe that to maintain sustainable economic growth and improve resource allocation efficiency,it is essential to reduce local protection and market segmentation.In view of the background of SOEs reform and the restructuring of the supply side,we explore how SOEs reliance on local government affects the improvement of resource allocation efficiency using Chinese firm-level data from the 1998-2007 period and 2013.We find that resource allocation played a waning role in boosting TFP in China.In addition,cities and industries that rely heavily on SOEs exhibited significantly smaller improvement in resource allocation efficiency.The results are robust to a variety of tests,including a change in the methods used to estimate the dependent variable,the use of the marketization index from Fan&Wang(2004)as an alternative measurement of reliance on SOEs and the deletion of SOEs controlled by the central government.We also introduce whether a city was selected as an allocation to establish new firms during the First Five-year Plan period as an instrumental variable,and use the quasi-natural experiment of the revocation of the department of textile and chemical industries with difference-in-differences(DD)and difference-in-differences-in-differences(DDD)methods to eliminate potential concerns about endogeneity.Our results are robust.Furthermore,using firm-level data,we explore the mechanism by which local governments reliance on SOEs affects the improvement of resource allocation efficiency.We arrive at three conclusions:it is more difficult for non-SOEs with higher productivity to obtain resources to expand the scales,new firms need higher TFP to enter the market and SOEs are less likely to exit the market.In the end,we estimate the output and employment gains and find that if resources were allocated effectively,the gross output value would increase by 9.7%and the total employment would increase by 11.2%.This paper has important political implications for the current reform of SOEs and for structural upgrading.Competition among local governments has promoted economic growth in the past,but its effects are diminishing.To guarantee China a prosperous and healthy economic growth,it is time to solve the problems of over-competition among regions,market segmentation and inefficient resource allocation and to establish an integrated market in which factors and products can flow freely.