IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/32795.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Privatization's Impacts on State-Owned Enterprises: A Tale of Zombie versus Healthy Firms

Author

Listed:
  • Ruiting Wang
  • Xue Wang
  • Gang Xu
  • Tao Zha

Abstract

We estimate the effects of privatization on zombie versus healthy state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, extending our analysis beyond TFP to a broad array of financial and economic indicators. Privatizing zombie SOEs enhances labor productivity and TFP, reduces bank and government subsidies, alleviates leverage and administrative expenses, improves liquidity, boosts profits, and accelerates sales growth. These benefits are more pronounced than for healthy SOEs and are robust across regions and industries. Our findings offer policy implications for emerging markets, suggesting that prioritizing the privatization of underperforming, zombie-like entities can lead to substantial economic improvements and greater efficiency.

Suggested Citation

  • Ruiting Wang & Xue Wang & Gang Xu & Tao Zha, 2024. "Privatization's Impacts on State-Owned Enterprises: A Tale of Zombie versus Healthy Firms," NBER Working Papers 32795, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32795
    Note: DEV EFG IO
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w32795.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D22 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Firm Behavior: Empirical Analysis
    • L21 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Business Objectives of the Firm
    • L33 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Comparison of Public and Private Enterprise and Nonprofit Institutions; Privatization; Contracting Out
    • P31 - Political Economy and Comparative Economic Systems - - Socialist Institutions and Their Transitions - - - Socialist Enterprises and Their Transitions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:nbr:nberwo:32795. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.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.