Selection, Staging, and Sequencing in the Recent Chinese Privatization
研究了中国私有化过程中地方政府如何选择国有企业、安排私有化顺序和程度，发现企业绩效与私有化决策呈倒U型关系，表现最差和最好的国企更可能保持国有或高比例国有持股。
Selection in privatization is the decision-making process of choosing state-owned enterprises (SOEs), prioritizing and sequencing privatization events, and determining the extent of private ownership in partial privatization. We investigate this process in the important but rarely studied case of China. Using the SOE population for 1998–2008, we track 49,456 wholly state-owned firms and identify 9,359 privatization cases. Our econometric analysis concludes that privatization selection is a complex decision-making process in which local governments balance various economic, financial, and political objectives. In the recent Chinese privatization, firm performance relates to the selection, staging, and sequencing in privatization in an inverted-U fashion. The worst- and the best-performing SOEs are more likely to remain state owned, more likely to maintain higher levels of state holding when privatized, and less likely to be privatized later. These patterns suggest a privatization reform slowdown and underlying changes in the privatization policy.