The Direction Of State-owned Enterprises Reform: Antitrust And Marketization

State-owned enterprises reform, which was defined as the focal point of economic reform since the year of 1984, is the most critical field of China's economic reform. By looking back the 30 years history of China's state-owned enterprises reform, this thesis appraised the successes and failures of the state-owned enterprises reform, identified and analyzed the critical points of the state-owned enterprises reform, and made some suggestions for the next step reform.This thesis analyzed the main characteristics of each stage of the reform and appraised the successes and failures of each stage through going through the 30 years history of the reform and describing the main policies and major events. This thesis categorized the reform, which started in 1978, into two main stages:first stage, which is from 1978 to 1992, is mainly categorized as decentralization and interest concessions, and exploration of separating ownership right and operation right; second stage, which started from the year of 1993, focuses on establishing and consummating modern enterprise system and deepening reform.Through reform, the profitability of the state-owned enterprises has been improved dramatically. However, this is difficult to be explained by the improvement of corporate governance. The improvement of corporate governance is not essential as it still reflects a series of issues, such as insiders'control, soft budge constraint, and administrative intervention. By analyzing the industrial distribution of the state-owned capital, I found that the industries that state-owned capital converges have obvious characteristics of monopoly and scarce resource, which resulted in the high profitability for state-owned enterprises. Furthermore, the thesis analyzed theoretically the impact of administrative monopoly on economy growth.How to deepen the reform of state-owned enterprises? The thesis concludes that the key point and the most difficult point is to deepen the reform of monopoly industries. The main task of deepening the reform of monopoly industries is to establish a clear division of administrative government and businesses and capital. In order to achieve this target, the key is to implement ownership reform, introduce market competition mechanism, and in the meantime reinforce government regulation and social supervision.The thesis has mainly three innovation points. The first, by reviewing and analisizing the 30 years history of China's state-owned enterprises reform, this thesis appraised the successes and failures of the state-owned enterprises reform, identified and analyzed the key point of the state-owned enterprises reform for next step, i.e. reform of monopoly industries. Second, analyzed capital concentration and profit distribution of state-owned enterprises, realized that state-owned capital mainly concentrated in monopoly industries and scarce resource industries and profits mainly lied in these two industries. The main reason of turning around the profitability of state-owned enterprises in 1990s is mainly due to the high administrative barrier, which results in insufficient market competition of these industries. Third, state-owned enterprises today still face insiders'control, soft budget constraint and administrative intervention. Therefore, to solve these issues, the next step is to deepen reform of monopoly industries and adjust state-owned economy distribution.