Institutional change and corporate governance diversity in China’s SOEs

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of different types of state ownership on corporate governance, with particular reference to state-owned enterprises in China. Our findings are that Chinese institutional reforms have produced diversified state ownership regimes. We argue that different types of government ownership exert different influences on ownership structure and executive shareholding. The study contributes to corporate governance research by challenging the conventional definition of state ownership and proposes that corporate governance studies should incorporate changing institutional environments in emerging economies.

Keywords:

• China
• boards
• corporate governance
• institutional environment
• PRC
• state-owned enterprises (SOEs)

Notes

1. For example, Beiya Industrial Corporation’s shareholders include Ha-Erbin Railway Bureau. However, it is difficult to categorize Ha-Erbin Railway Bureau because this special bureau is led by both the Ministry of Railways and Ha-Erbin local government.

2. Although Chinese institutional changes produced three groups of government owners, we focus on the comparison between the central government and local (municipal) government as two ends of the spectrum of SOE. The third group of government owners, provincial governments, present an intermediate category in terms of their resources and political risk of supporting their SOEs i.e. provincial governments have more resources and less risk than municipal government but more risk and less resources than central government.

3. For simplicity, we ignore the presence of the independent variables.

4. The Sargan test could be an alternative. However, the Hansen test is considered to be more robust in the presence of autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity.