[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/1723.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The productivity effects of decentralized reforms - an analysis of the Chinese industrial reforms

Author

Listed:
  • Lixin Colin Xu
Abstract
The empirical literature on the effects of ownership has not distinguished between the effects of ownership and the effects of control. It has also generally ignored the dynamic effects of various ownership and control rights. Using a rich set of panel data about changes in China's state-owned enterprises, the author examines the static and dynamic effects of decentralizing ownership and control rights. He finds that productivity and growth rates improved significantly when reform improved the incentives for managers and employees to learn and to work hard - for example by decentralizing the rights to control wages, make production decisions, and appoint new managers. Increasing profit-retention rates and adopting performance contracts - conventionally viewed as the most important reforms for China's state enterprises - did not improve productivity much. Overall, decentralization accounted for a least 42 percent of productivity growth in Chinese state enterprises in the 1980s. Much of that gain came from improvements in the growth rate of productivity rather than in improved levels of productivity.

Suggested Citation

  • Lixin Colin Xu, 1997. "The productivity effects of decentralized reforms - an analysis of the Chinese industrial reforms," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1723, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:1723
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/1997/02/01/000009265_3970625094009/Rendered/PDF/multi_page.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Arvind Virmani, 2009. "China’s Socialist Market Economy: Lessons for Democratic Developing Countries," Working Papers id:1899, eSocialSciences.
    2. Arvind Virmani, 2005. "China's Socialist Market Economy: Lessons of Success," Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi Working Papers 178, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi, India.
    3. Arvind Virmani, 2006. "China’s Socialist Market Economy - Lessons Of Success," Macroeconomics Working Papers 22274, East Asian Bureau of Economic Research.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:1723. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Roula I. Yazigi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.