Zhang Haoruo: On the Reform of Stateowned Enterprises

Speaking at a press conference held a few days ago by the Press And Information Office of the State Council, Mr. Zhang Haoruo, vice-minister of the State Structural Reform Commission talked to Chinese and foreign newspapermen about the current state of the ongoing reform of state-owned enterprises in China.

Fault Tolerance for Corporate Innovation:Evidence from the Reform of State-owned Enterprises

Innovation is the source of power for high-quality development,and a relaxed institutional arrangement is a necessity for promoting innovation in enterprises.This paper examines the impact of fault tolerance on corporate innovation,theoretically analyzes the positive effects of fault tolerance on stimulating innovation,and estimates the influence of fault tolerance on corporate innovation by using the panel data of listed manufacturing companies from 2007 to 2019,taking the quasi-natural experiment of fault-tolerance system in various places since the new round of stateowned enterprise(SOE)reform.This study finds that the fault-tolerance system has significantly improved the R&D investment and patent application of the pilot SOEs,but the incentive effect is mainly reflected in the utility model patents;fault-tolerance system mainly promotes corporate innovation by alleviating managers’career worries and improving governance ability.Furthermore,the fault-tolerance system is more effective for small and medium-sized SOEs with low market competition and can alleviate the restriction of agency cost on corporate innovation.In addition,the fault-tolerance system has not yet had a significant spillover effect on private enterprises.These results show that in the SOE reform,it is necessary to strengthen the institutional arrangement of fault tolerance and create a relaxed environment to encourage innovation;it is necessary to organically integrate fault-tolerancesystem design into executive measurement and corporate governance,promote faulttolerant system to be implemented in a wider range of enterprises,and enhance the incentive effect on high-quality innovation.

From State to State: Quasi-privatization and Firm Performance

This paper uses a sample of Chinese listed companies whose controlling shareholders have changed from government agencies to state-owned enterprises＇ （SOEs）, to examine whether reducing government intervention while maintaining government＇s ultimate control could improve firm performance. The results show that the overall performance of these firms improves after the transfer of their controlling shareholders, due to improvements in both operating and non-operating performance. When we separate all samples into solely SOEs and other SOEs based on the controlling shareholder, we find that operating performance improved significantly in the solely SOE group, whereas non-operating performance improved significantly in the SOE group. In addition, we identify sources of performance improvement from two perspectives： corporate governance and related party transactions. The results imply that the Chinese Government should continue to decentralize control and, at the same time, continue to monitor firm operating efficiency.