非国有股东治理与国有企业高质量创新——基于政府行政效率视角的再审视

Non-state Shareholders’Governance,and High-quality Innovation of State-owned Enterprises-A Re-examination Based on the Perspective of Government Administrative Efficiency

让市场在资源配置中起决定性作用和更好发挥政府作用,是全面建设社会主义现代化国家的关键路径。如何有效改善国有企业的创新活动成为新时代做强做优做大国有企业的重要内容。以行政审批中心设立测度高水平行政效率,深入研究非国有股东派出董事参与治理对国有企业创新的影响,结果发现:非国有股东治理能够提高国有企业的创新质量,但这仅在国有企业所在地的政府行政效率较高时才明显存在,而在行政效率较低时缺乏相应效果。进一步研究表明,非国有股东治理能够改善国有企业对科技型人才的激励形式,促使其引进具有较强研发能力的高学历人才,最终对国有企业的市场价值和生产能力产生积极影响。因此,较高水平的行政效率是非国有股东提升国有企业创新质量的前提条件,党和国家在深化国有企业混合所有制改革、推动非国有股东参与国有企业治理时,更需要在行政效率等营商环境上配套优化,确保非国有股东切实发挥积极作用。

In recent years, in the context of the new era of economic structural transformation and upgrading, how to effectively improve the independent innovation capabilities of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) has become a topic of common concern in academic research and social practice. However, regarding the influencing factors of corporate innovation, the existing literature mainly focuses on the external institutional environment and internal governance characteristics, which not only ignores the positive impact of board governance on SOEs’ innovation under the heterogeneity of property rights, but also fails to pay enough attention to the important role of government efficiency in the governance of SOEs.This paper conducts an in-depth research of the impact of non-state shareholders’ appointing directors to participate in governance on the innovation of SOEs by manually collecting and checking the data on the nature, relationships, shareholdings and appointing directors of the top ten shareholders disclosed in the annual reports of state-owned listed companies. It finds that non-state shareholders’ governance can improve the quality of SOEs’ innovations, but that only exists when the government administrative efficiency is high, and there is no corresponding effect when the administrative efficiency of the government is low. Further research finds that non-state shareholders’ governance can improve the SOEs’ incentive forms for scientific and technological talents and promote SOEs to introduce more highly educated talents with research and development capabilities. And the market value and production capacity of SOEs with optimized innovation characteristics have been significantly improved. This paper has the following two academic contributions. First, different from traditional literature that only examines the role of mixed ownership on SOEs’ innovation from an internal perspective, when researching the impact of non-state shareholders’ governance on SOEs’ innovation, this paper for the first time incorporates the key institutional factor of government administrative efficiency into the analytical framework, thus expanding the theoretical literature on the antecedents and consequences of SOEs’ innovation. Second, unlike the existing literature that treats non-state shareholders as a whole, this paper manually identifies non-state shareholders who do not have mutual shareholding, trusteeship and other related relationships with state-owned shareholders, and researches the impact of the latter’s participation in governance on the innovation of SOEs, thereby expanding the academic literature on the nature of property rights and corporate innovation.The conclusion shows that high-efficiency administration is a prerequisite for non-state shareholders to improve the innovation quality of state-owned enterprises, which provides important practical reference for local governments to better deepen the mixed ownership reform of SOEs, and for SOEs to better utilize the governance of non-state shareholders to achieve innovation-driven development. On the one hand, in the current SOEs’ reform process, non-state shareholders appointing directors to SOEs have produced positive results. Relevant departments should continue to deepen reforms and stimulate the vitality of SOEs. On the other hand, to effectively play the active role of non-state shareholders requires relevant supporting measures. Local governments must coordinate and optimize the business environment in terms of administrative efficiency and other aspects to ensure that non-state shareholders truly participate in the governance of SOEs.