The development of modern economy since the industrial revolution, in a sense, is the development and development process of what we call "market economy". Today's western developed countries, driven by the early industrial revolution, have gradually transitioned from the feudal economic system in the Middle Ages to the modern market economic system. In this process, although different countries show differences in transformation due to different historical backgrounds, such as the distinction between the so-called "American-style road" and "German-style road" due to different degrees of state intervention, on the whole, the free enterprise system and the ideology of advocating free competition and resisting excessive state intervention are the mainstream, and the transformation to market economy has the characteristics of "natural development". After the October Revolution, especially after the Second World War, a number of countries that successively embarked on the socialist road adopted a planned economic system in the early days. Some of these countries, such as the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries, have achieved a certain degree of capitalist economic development before, while others, such as China, have a low level of overall economic development, and capitalist economic relations have only developed in some areas, but they are in the bud on a larger scale. In the early and middle stages of implementing the planned economy, these countries all experienced high industrial and economic growth, but the insurmountable contradictions within the system eventually prompted these countries to start the "transformation" to the market economy in different ways.
In "naturally developed" countries, market expansion presents a trajectory from commodity market to capital market.
Although the financial system serving production is also developing, the rise and large-scale development of the securities market is directly stimulated by a large number of financing and the demand for mergers and acquisitions between enterprises. As a "transitional" country, we have basically established a modern industrial base and reached a high level in some areas, which can compete with western developed countries. The factory system is not only established, but also has a relatively systematic management system. Different from "natural development", these factories are not stimulated by market expansion, but mainly rely on government planning. Therefore, they are "factories" rather than "enterprises". From such a starting point, how to realize the market-oriented "transformation" of these factories and what kind of order and logic to adopt in the "transformation" have become the problems we are facing.
No matter what "argument" is adopted in theory and policy, the reform of state-owned enterprises in China is actually "market-oriented" from the beginning. At the beginning of the reform, enterprises could not decide what to produce, how much to produce and at what price to sell. The national plan is considered as a major defect in the enterprise system and needs to be changed, so enterprises are required to "organize production for the market". Enterprises first enter the commodity market, and in the commodity market, they first enter the consumer goods market. It is no accident that price reform became the focus of economic reform in 1980s. First of all, the prices of most consumer goods have been liberalized. Then, through the combination of "dual track system", the prices of most investment products were liberalized in the late 1980s and early 1990s. China's state-owned enterprises first experienced the baptism of commodity market competition and made a series of important achievements.
1, clearly and preliminarily learn to organize production according to market demand.
2. Stimulated the increase of supply and the formation of buyer's market.
3. The differentiation of products and enterprises has accelerated, and a number of competitive enterprises have emerged.
4. A group of entrepreneurs emerged in the fierce market competition.
In short, the development of the commodity market for a period of time has caused some substantial changes in all enterprises, including state-owned enterprises, and even the entire national economy. There are very few enterprises that rely entirely on the state for food and livelihood (although it cannot be said that there is no). For the reform of state-owned enterprises, the changes brought by the commodity market have created an indispensable prerequisite for the development of the capital market. Here we are concerned about the above-mentioned market development order. Theoretically, it can be assumed that the capital market develops before the commodity market, or both advance simultaneously, but the operators of the capital market will soon find that enterprises will not produce and sell products according to the market demand, and they don't know which enterprises can survive and make profits in the market competition, become the leading enterprises, who will merge who in the enterprise restructuring, and who are real entrepreneurs rather than fake entrepreneurs. In this case, it is self-evident what kind of development the capital market can have.
While the commodity market has made great progress and solved some problems, the problems it cannot solve are becoming more and more obvious. Some of these problems are old problems rooted in the traditional system, which tend to be clear and sharp under the new situation, and some are new problems brought about by the development of commodity market. Generally speaking, it is concentrated on several important contradictions.
The first contradiction is the contradiction between the "pseudo-ownership" of state-owned enterprises and the requirement of market competition for the promotion of the owner's role. The so-called "pseudo-ownership" does not mean that there is no legal and formal owner, but that such "owner" cannot effectively assume due responsibilities. This is an old problem left over from the traditional system, but in the new environment where market competition tends to be fierce, the requirements for owners have increased, and the consequences of enterprise competition will be very different with different "qualities" of owners. This point is often used to explain the phenomenon of poor management and continuous losses of state-owned enterprises. Analyzing the reasons for the large-scale losses of state-owned enterprises in recent years, people even have reason to express deep doubts about whether the leaders of state-owned enterprises have clear profit motives. This is one aspect.
On the other hand, the governance structure of state-owned enterprises and other public enterprises and the behavior of operators present a complex state. Under the background of enterprise power expansion, a considerable number of enterprises, especially the old enterprises from bad to good, have become "new state-owned enterprises" from scratch since the reform, and the top managers have actually mastered most of the residual control rights and some of the residual claims. These people are different from the enterprise managers before the reform, and also different from the salary managers employed by the older generation of entrepreneurs in western countries. They are entrepreneurs to varying degrees, and people seem to have a default attitude towards their residual control rights and claims, thinking that "enterprises founded by others should have legal rights." In this sense, these operators are already "adventurers" to some extent. But the existing formal economic relations and legal relations do not all recognize and protect their de facto rights. At the same time, in the process of marketization, business operators have harmed the interests of legitimate owners and other stakeholders (such as employees). From on-the-job consumption to asset transfer, the space is much larger than that in the planned economy period. In this way, reasonable negation and illegal control make the behavior of operators fall into a state of contradiction and distortion. Indeed, some people completely "eat" and "dig" public ownership, while others "go astray" because of the "right path". The ownership of public ownership may not be implemented. As a special kind of human capital, the ownership of operators has always been real. If the existing system does not recognize and protect it, it will be manifested in a way that conflicts with the existing system. In recent years, some well-known entrepreneurs have "accidents" and the phenomenon of "poor temples and rich monks" is widespread and cannot be explained by personal qualities alone. China's characteristic "insider control phenomenon" should have a more practical explanation. In any case, the question we are facing is whether we can create an institutional environment conducive to the stable and long-term development of entrepreneurs.
The second contradiction is the contradiction between the de facto ownership of state-owned capital by departments and regions and the improvement of production socialization. It is an indisputable fact that state-owned capital is nominally or legally owned by the state, but most of it is actually owned by departments and regions. In the non-market environment, state-owned capital should have the realistic possibility of operation, and "compartmentalization" is the inevitable choice. The disadvantages of "compartmentalization" have been analyzed a lot, such as artificially cutting off the internal relations between production and operation, redundant construction, regional blockade and so on. Under the new situation of enterprise scale expansion and intensified differentiation, "compartmentalization" has brought at least two outstanding problems. First, it is increasingly difficult to provide sufficient financial support, especially direct financing support, to the rapidly expanding superior enterprises, and it is increasingly difficult to digest the inferior enterprises that have failed in competition within their own administrative power. Second, it is increasingly difficult for "rules" and "blocks" to provide competent entrepreneurs in the fierce market competition within their own administrative scope. Apart from other issues, this means that with the expansion of the scale of enterprises, the original owners have a "shortage" of both monetary capital and human capital. If there is a contradiction between the capital possession of private individuals, families and partners and the socialization of production in western countries, there is also an obvious contradiction between the "division of ownership" and the increasing socialization of production and capital management in our economy. Although these two situations are very different in specific national conditions and the nature of ownership, there are similarities in the form of ownership. In western countries, the contradiction has been alleviated to some extent through the "openness" and "socialization" of the ownership structure of enterprises, that is, through the external share expansion, including the listing of enterprises. The contradiction caused by the "compartmentalization" we are facing also needs to be solved through the opening and flow of the equity structure.
This change in ownership structure also has a deeper significance, that is, it provides the necessary conditions for solving the problem of separating government from enterprises. This can still be understood from a comparative perspective. The separation of the owner's function and some operators' functions in western countries does not rule out hiring professional managers when the equity is still closed, but most of them appear after the equity is "opened". On the one hand, "openness" makes the rights and interests of enterprises no longer equal to (generally greater than) the original owners' rights and interests; On the other hand, due to the existence of multiple owners, owners (investors) can compete and flow with each other to form a capital market, and the basic information generated in the capital market is convenient for owners to understand the operating conditions of enterprises. These changes make it possible to distinguish the functions of owners and managers. Regarding the problem of separating government from enterprise, it is logically inevitable for the government to be the de facto owner on the premise of adhering to the state-owned system, and it is futile to find other state-owned owners outside the government. However, if an enterprise has only one government department as the owner, and this subordinate relationship has a long history, it will be very difficult to separate the functions of the owner and the operator. Positive changes can only begin when new owners are introduced. New and old owners are mobile and can provide information about the business situation in some way.
The third contradiction is the contradiction between the state-owned economic front being stretched too long and the "market failure" problem that appears with the expansion of market competition. Accurately speaking, before and at the beginning of the reform, this contradiction could not stand out, or even become a problem, because when the state-owned economy dominated, there was no problem of "too long front" and when the market economy did not develop greatly, there could be no problem of "market failure". Once this contradiction is highlighted, an implicit premise is that the market economy has developed to a considerable extent. The recent emphasis on shortening the front line and adjusting the state-owned economic structure is based on the fact that the market economy has begun to play a fundamental role in the allocation of resources in China, especially the market competition in competitive industries has intensified. In this context, the state-owned economy does not have a definite advantage in the competitive field. Although it is also possible to find competitive outstanding state-owned enterprises, most of them are in trouble. On the other hand, things that can't be managed, managed badly and don't want to be managed by market forces alone have increased a lot, and contradictions have become increasingly prominent. How to transfer the limited state-owned economic resources to the most needed and effective areas has become an urgent problem.
This strategic adjustment of the state-owned economy involves the "positioning" of the state-owned economy in the new system. In recent years, there are different views on the state-owned economy, such as emphasizing "property right reform", emphasizing the role of operators, and emphasizing the establishment of a competitive environment. There are some disputes between them. In the theory of "property right reform", the simple logic that "public property cannot be cared for and cared for like private property" is followed explicitly or implicitly, and the tendency of its conclusion is relatively clear. Those who emphasize the role of managers take into account the rising trend of professional managers in modern enterprises, and have recently been supported by human capital theory and China's practical experience. The viewpoint of attaching importance to the competitive environment holds that the most important thing is to create an equal competitive environment in order to obtain enough information to evaluate the performance of enterprises. It is undoubtedly beneficial to discuss the same problem from multiple angles, which also shows the complexity of the problem. For reformers who emphasize property rights, it is necessary to explain the fact that there is also a piece of "national capital" or "social capital" in countries that admire private capital most and are most "laissez-faire", such as the United States. For those who emphasize the role of operators, it is necessary to explain the phenomenon that the agency cost of state-owned enterprise operators is generally higher than that of non-state-owned enterprises, and we will find that the reorganized state-owned economic operators are different from those in the general sense. For those who emphasize the competitive environment, they will also find that most of the restructured state-owned capital is not in the competitive field. If we continue to analyze the state-owned economy with general property rights and enterprise theory, it will be difficult to get rid of the logical dilemma, because its implicit premise is that state-owned enterprises are still regarded as enterprises in the general sense. Obviously, for the state-owned capital based on solving the problem of "market failure", most of them will be in the non-competitive field, or for the state-owned economy undergoing strategic restructuring, a set of more practical theories, including state theory, externality theory and government regulation theory, are needed to better explain the problem itself.
The three contradictions mentioned above are intertwined, not entirely at the same level, but they can still be explained by unified logic. It is not difficult to understand that the third contradiction is basic and needs to be solved through the functional transformation of the state-owned economy and the substantial adjustment of the strategic focus. In this way, it is likely that most or most of the state-owned capital will be transferred to non-competitive areas. Theoretically, it is required to get rid of the limitation of treating enterprises with state-owned capital as ordinary enterprises. For the state-owned capital that has been in the competitive field for a long time for various reasons (although this part of state-owned capital will show a decreasing trend with the passage of time), the first and second contradictions are inevitable and must be solved. The basic approach is to gradually realize the "modernization" of enterprise property right structure and internal governance structure on the basis of introducing capital market, and its core is to form a mechanism between owners and operators that is conducive to the long-term stable development of enterprises.
Secondly, the emergence and resolution of the above three contradictions have obvious stage characteristics, or only when the transition "turns" to a certain extent will it happen. Without the development of commodity market, these contradictions either lack the basis of occurrence or exist, but they will not be sharp. In other words, after solving some problems, the commodity market raises some problems, which cannot be solved by the commodity market itself and must rely on the cultivation and development of the capital market. In this way, we have the answer to the above question: the marketization reform of state-owned enterprises also follows the order from commodity market to capital market, which is completely determined by the internal logic of marketization process.
From the perspective of strategic restructuring of the state-owned economy, the capital market is expected to solve the following problems in the reform of state-owned enterprises.
First, support the state-owned economy to shrink the front line and focus on withdrawing from the competitive field. When the goal of strategic restructuring of state-owned economy is determined, that is, whether state-owned capital should withdraw in some fields is determined, the next question is how to withdraw. We don't rule out that some state-owned capital directly "exits" by changing the use of physical form, but in most cases, due to the existence of asset specificity, we must first solve the problem of realizing state-owned capital from physical form to value form, otherwise it will still be impossible to "exit". For example, if state-owned capital wants to withdraw from a textile factory, the machinery, equipment, workshop and inventory of the factory are obviously not suitable for the new use of state-owned capital. Therefore, first of all, appropriate traders should realize the state-owned capital through auction, equity transfer and other means, and give a reasonable price in the process of realizing it, so that the state-owned capital cannot be underestimated. This requires a capital market to solve the problems of "seeking traders" and "seeking traders" in the process of state-owned capital withdrawal.
Second, the core of promoting the rationalization of enterprise organizational structure is the growth of large enterprises and the formation of a new division of labor and cooperation system. The polarization between products and enterprises in recent years will lead to two important results. One result is the growth of large enterprises, especially the gradual formation of a number of large enterprises measured by international standards. The victory of commodity market competition has laid a preliminary foundation for enterprises to "grow" in production, technology, sales, management and brand, but without the support of capital market, the expansion speed of enterprises will be relatively slow, and some enterprises may stagnate at the existing level. Most well-known large enterprises in the world have a good financial support system, such as almost all listed companies. This can also explain that in developed countries, listed companies usually account for only a small proportion of the total number of companies (such as one thousandth or two), but large companies are rarely not listed companies. Another result is that enterprises that account for the majority of the total number of enterprises and fail in the competition or at least have no advantage will have a process of division of labor and cooperation with large enterprises to regroup. The new division of labor and cooperation includes horizontal association (such as becoming the final product producer in the production system of large enterprises), vertical association (such as raw materials, parts suppliers and product promoters) and mixed association (such as cross-industry integration into the diversified business structure of large enterprises). At present, there is an obvious tendency to despise small and medium-sized enterprises, believing that these enterprises have no scale advantage, so they have no competitiveness and development prospects. In fact, in a reasonable economic system, large, medium and small enterprises have an appropriate proportional relationship, and most enterprises are still small and medium-sized enterprises. As for "economies of scale", according to stigler, a famous American economist, who has a lot of empirical experience, all enterprises that can survive in a competitive environment have their scale rationality. Our past problem is not the existence of a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises, but the lack of efficient links between small and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises. For example, all small and medium-sized enterprises in an industry produce final products. In this situation, the only way out is to rebuild the division of labor and cooperation among large, medium and small enterprises through acquisition, merger, bankruptcy and trusteeship. In this process, the capital market is not only indispensable, but also the most advantageous.
Third, it is helpful to solve a series of basic problems in enterprise property right system and internal governance structure. As the goal of enterprise reform, the modern enterprise system has been clearly defined. In the process of achieving this goal, people often pay attention to the change of organizational structure and pursue the similarity between organizational form and international experience, such as forming a corporate governance structure composed of shareholders' meeting, board of directors and senior managers, and establishing state-owned shareholding institutions. , and it is easy to ignore the role of the capital market as its foundation. But there is no capital market, and the determination of property rights boundary, the exertion of shareholders' role, the supervision of managers and the evaluation of operating performance are all fundamental solutions. Take the property right problem that many people talk about as an example. If there is no "transaction" in the capital market, the price of assets cannot be determined, and the value boundary of property rights is not clear. Secondly, under the condition of market transactions, assets will flow to the subject with high evaluation, which will lead to the improvement of resource allocation efficiency. If there is no efficiency improvement caused by mobility, the so-called "clear property rights" will not have much meaning. Although we can't assert that with the developed capital market, many problems that have plagued our property rights and enterprise organizational structure for a long time will be solved (which may require the cooperation of other conditions), but without the role of the capital market, these problems will certainly not be solved.
If we say that the development of product market has made a breakthrough in the economic reform of state-owned enterprises in the past decade and promoted the establishment of the goal of socialist market economy reform, with the cultivation and development of capital market, the resolution of many contradictions analyzed earlier will make the system transition of state-owned enterprises in China make qualitative progress, and in a sense, it will mean the basic establishment of the institutional framework of socialist market economy in China.