Endowment Structure, property rights and reforms of large state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China: Past, present and future

Based on the criteria of the factor endowment structure of state-owned enterprise (SOE) sectors in China between 1980 and 2018, this paper rationalizes the classified reforming of China's state sectors by con-structing a Nash bargaining model to capture the dynamics of ownership restructuring, and the reduction process of policy burden on SOEs. We reveal that the interplay between policy burden bared by SOEs and the ownership restructuring process largely depends upon their factor intensities since the reform pe-riod in the 1980s. Our model identifies two Ownership Reform Irrelevance Points (ORIP), which serve as the benchmark for the dynamics of the ownership restructuring process of China's large SOEs, which saw them move from 'mixed-ownership' to 'privatization'. ORIPs demonstrate the need for a reduction in social policy burdens with regards to the state sector's comparative advantage of factor endowment structure through SOE ownership restructuring. This study theoretically analyzes existing literatures on the classified reforms of China's state sectors from 1978 to 2018. This study is the first to base such an analysis on the criteria of factor endowment structure focusing on the connection between the policy burdens bared by SOEs and their ownership restructuring process.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.