【英文】牛津经济研究院报告：中国中车在全球轨道车市场中的作用（25页）

As recently as the dawn of the 21st century, economists were broadly dismissive  of SOEs, regarding them as a relic from an earlier era of Marxist theorizing.3 Both  Eastern and Western governments had spent the previous 20 years divesting  themselves of failed state-run entities. SOEs appeared inherently inefcient, and  therefore only justifable when a strong public policy purpose existed, and in  industries where market failure prevented the efcient provision of the goods or  services by private entities. The important questions were therefore thought to be  which industries (e.g., utilities, education, healthcare) justifed the low productivity  of direct government provision, and how to handle the political economy of  divesting from legacy SOEs. There are good theoretical reasons to expect SOEs to be less efcient than  their private counterparts. Like all frms, SOEs are subject to the principal-agent  problem, whereby frm owners seek to control the actions of frm managers in  order to maximize the owners’ objectives. 

For private owners, these objectives are  efectively synonymous with medium- to long-run proft maximization. For an SOE,  the objectives of the state owner are multiple, and may include the maintenance of  political or social stability through generous employment and retirement policies,  or over-investment in local development projects. These problems may be largely  overcome by properly incentivizing SOE managers, and through greater oversight.  However, if the goal is proft-maximization, governments can better achieve this  aim through taxation of, or portfolio investment in, a private entity.4 Over the last couple of decades, however, something unexpected has happened:  the role of SOEs in the global economy has expanded. As Fig. 1, adapted from an  International Monetary Fund report on SOEs, shows, the share of assets of the  largest global frms that are controlled by SOEs increased from approximately 6%  in 2006 to 20% by 2018, driven to a large extent by the growth of Chinese SOEs.  Clearly, the theory of SOEs’ increasing irrelevance has not been born out in the  world’s second largest economy.