纵向一体化抑或专业化?——来自中国电力行业市场化改革的证据

Vertical Integration or Specialization?Evidence from Market-oriented Reform of the Chinese Electricity Industry

本文构建了一个考虑改革前电力市场发展平衡度的理论模型,利用2003年中国电力行业“厂网分开”的准自然实验,采用2000—2007年中国工业企业数据,同时考察了该项改革对发电部门与供电部门企业生产率的影响。研究发现,纵向拆分显著降低了发电企业的生产率,但提高了电网企业的生产率。进一步分析表明,纵向拆分对发电与供电部门企业生产率影响的差异与改革前电力行业内部发展平衡度有关:在改革前发电部门投资更受重视而供电部门投资更受抑制的地区,纵向拆分会增大对发电企业生产率的抑制效应,并扩大对电网企业生产率的提升效应。

This paper innovatively establishes a theoretical model that considers the balance lev-el of the electricity market development before the reform,and proposes the hypothesis about effects of the vertical unbundling reform on firms'productivity in the electricity industry.Then by exploiting the quasi-natural experiment of the vertical unbundling that took place in China in 2003,and based on the data of Chinese Industrial Enterprises Database from 2000 to 2007,this paper investigates simultaneously its effects on the productivity of firms in generation and trans-mission sectors for the first time.It finds that the reform decreased the productivity of generation firms but increased that of transmission firms.Additional investigation reveals that the discrepan-cy in the impacts of vertical unbundling between the productivity of generation and that of trans-mission firms is related to the internal development balance of the electricity industry before the reform in China.In the regions where the investment of the generation sector was more prioritized while the investment of the transmission sector was more suppressed before the reform,vertical unbundling had a more negative impact on the productivity of generation firms but a more positive impact on that of transmission firms.This paper provides an important implication for further deepening the reform of the energy industry in China.