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Local Information and the Decentralization of State-Owned

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Local Information and the Decentralization of State-Owned This version: May 19, 2014 Local Information and the Decentralization of State-Owned Enterprises in China: Hayek is Right1 Zhangkai Huang Tsinghua University Lixing Li Peking University Guangrong Ma Renmin University of China Lixin Colin Xu World Bank Abstract. Hayek (1945) argues that local knowledge a key for understanding the efficiency of alternative economic systems and whether production should be organized in centralized or decentralized ways. In this paper we test Hayek’s central predictions by examining the causes and consequences of the government’s decision to decentralize state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under its oversight from 1998 to 2007. The government that is located closer to an SOE is assumed to have more information over nearby firms. Hayek (1945) then implies that a centralized enterprise (i.e., those under the oversight of a higher level of government) should be more likely to be decentralized (i.e., being delegated to a lower level of government) when the distance between the oversight government and the enterprise is greater, and that decentralization should lead to efficiency gains in general and especially when the distance is farther to begin with. Moreover, where the oversight government’s uncertainty over an enterprise’s performance or communication costs are greater, the oversight government is more likely to decentralize enterprises so that lower oversight governments can better take advantage of local information. We find empirical support for all these implications. The role of local information is key in explaining both the causes and consequences of decentralization. The results suggest that Hayek’s insight on the importance of local information explains dynamics in the organizational structure of the state economy as well. Keywords: Local information; organizational structure; decentralization; distance. 1 We have benefited from useful comments and help of Jens Matthias Arnold, Gary Gorton, Beata S. Javorcik, Mathew Kahn, Gary Libecap, Mary Shirley, Shang-Jin Wei, Xiaobo Zhang and other participants of NBER-CCER conference. Financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#71203004) is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed here do not necessarily represent those of the World Bank or its member countries. 1 “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is manly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and space, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the sources immediately available to meet them. We cannot expect that this problem will be solved by first communicating all this knowledge to a central board, which, after integrating all knowledge, issues its orders. We must solve it by some form of decentralization.” ——— Hayek (1945) 1. Introduction One of the most important economic dramas in the last century was the emergence and then decline of planned economy and state ownership. For a long while, it seems that socialism could be as productive, if not more, than capitalist economy. In the 1973 edition of the famous economics textbook (Samuelson 1973), for instance, Samuelson predicted that the Soviet Union’s income level would probably match that of the United States by 1990 and overtake it by 2010. The debate of the merits of market socialism in the first half of the last century thus involved top economists such as Oscar Lange, Abba Lerner, Ludwig von Mises, and Frederick Hayek. The key arguments for why capitalism would be more efficient than socialism are perhaps two: the stronger individual incentives under the stronger protection of private property rights, and the efficiency of utilizing specific information dispersed among individuals and plants (Boettke, 2004). The second point is of course originated from Hayek (1945), one of the most influential papers of all time.2 The key importance of incentives, ownership and property rights for explaining performance in socialist and transitional economies is perhaps one of the most active areas for research in the past few decades (Shleifer and Vishny, 1994; Megginson and Netter 2001; Djankov and Murrell 2002; Knack and Keefer, 1995; Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson 2001; Li and Xu 2004; Estrin et al., 2009). However, the importance of local information for efficiency in socialist or transitional economies or the state-owned sector, is rarely systematically empirically explored. 2 As of January 2014, Hayek (1945) has been cited more than 10,000 times in Google Scholar, and it is viewed by some top economists as one of the top 20 articles published in AER in the first 100 years of AER (Arrow et al. 2011). 2 In this paper we examine the cause and consequence of decentralizing state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China, focusing on the role of local information. The data we use is the Annual Survey of Industrial Firms (ASIF), which covers non-state firms with sales exceeding 5 million Yuan and all SOEs. Decentralization here is defined as the oversight government shifting from a higher to a lower level of government—that is, from the central to provincial, from provincial to city (alternatively called prefecture), and from city to county government.3 The availability of local information is captured by the distance between an SOE and its oversight government. A longer distance of the oversight government from the SOE implies that the oversight government can have less direct observations on firm performance, managerial competence, and firm competitiveness. Indeed, there is a large literature providing evidence that distance has huge consequences for firms. For instance, distance (in terms of trust level and physical distance) helps explain decentralization decision between multinational headquarters and oversea subsidiaries (Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen, 2012); distance helps explain a headquarter’s investment allocation across plants in different locations (Giroud 2013); distance has been found to have profound implications for lending relationship between banks and firms (Peterson and Rajan 1994, 2002; Mian, 2006; Agarwal and Hauswalkd, 2010); and distance has been found to be a good proxy of information asymmetry (Coval and Moskowitz 1999; Garmaise and Moskowitz, 2004; Grinblatt and Keloharju 2001; Hau, 2001). Hayek (1945) implies that it would be more efficient for the oversight government with a longer distance to the SOE to delegate (or decentralize) the control rights to a lower level of government, which in general has a shorter distance to the SOE. Moreover, when firms’ performance is harder to predict—and therefore local information looms larger—the same distance would imply a higher tendency to decentralize to better utilize local information. In addition, when communication costs are lower, the oversight government would have less problem finding out what is going on in the SOE, and the same distance would imply a lower tendency to decentralize. Moreover, with better utilization of local information, decentralization should facilitate efficiency, especially when location information is especially importance such as when uncertainty over firm performance and when communication costs are high. We should point out here that Hayek’s point does not imply that SOEs should always be 3 Chinese local government consists of several (from higher to lower) levels as follows: provincial, city (or prefecture), county, and township. As of 1998, there are 31 provincial-level, 331 city-level, and 2863 county-level governments. 3 decentralized so that the distance between the SOE and the oversight government should be minimal. Tilting the balance toward centralizing include other considerations, such as internalizing externality of the SOE, pursuing goals of upper levels of government, and making top-notch experts who can specialize in complex and difficult problems to be in charge of some sophisticated SOEs (Garicano 2000). We find support for all those conjectures implied by Hayek (1945). In particular, we find that the longer the distance between the oversight government and the SOE, the more likely the oversight government is to decentralize the SOE. The positive decentralization-distance link is stronger when firm performance exhibits more uncertainty, and when communication costs are higher (as proxied by lower density of road). We also find that after decentralization SOEs tend to have better performance, represented by higher total factor productivity (TFP). Moreover, the gains from decentralization seem to be higher for those SOEs who experienced a larger decline in distance to oversight government, and the productivity gains for those SOEs with a large reduction in physical distance to the oversight government tend to be more pronounced when firm performance is more uncertain and when local road network is less dense. We recognize there are many ways in which the relationship between decentralization and distance may have other interpretations. To guard against this, we conduct a number of checks. We mitigate omitted variable bias by including industry and year fixed effects, dummies indicating the same original oversight government, along with province-year-level macro controls (and in alternative specification, fiscal conditions of the original oversight government and its lower level government), so that the treatment and control groups are more comparable. To guard against the possibility that the distance to oversight governments
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