Quantitative Evaluation on Publicly- and Non-publicly-Owned Economic Structures: Estimation Based on Economic Censuses

Abstract

The concepts, indicators, methods and data that have been used in previous studies on the ownership structure were reviewed and evaluated in chapter four. Overall, the data with the most accurate description on the ownership structure in the secondary and tertiary industries now publicly available are those of economic censuses, and the second economic census in 2008 even provided information on total assets, the indicator that best described the ownership structure. The indicator of assets is the best to describe the structure of various forms of ownership because the assets of an enterprise are the economic resource expressed as monetary currencies it owns or controls, and have wider connotations and are more adaptive in describing the statuses of various forms of ownership compared to other indicators such as capital. However, the statistical regulations and research methods that are currently widely used have not kept up with the rapid development of the economy with mixed ownership. The situation has become even worsened since the economy of mixed ownership was defined, in the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCCPC), as “an important way to materialize the basic economic system” in socialist China, the development of which “is beneficial to variously owned forms of capital to complement each other while mutually improving and developing” (On Nov. 12, 2013, the 3rd Plenary Session of the 18th CCCPC unanimously passed the bill, Resolution by the Central Committee of CPC on Several Important Issues about Comprehensively Deepening the Reform.). It is now impetus to accurately define the ownership nature of the economy with mixed ownership and to correctly calculate its efficiency to empower its development with theoretical support. Therefore, new methods to calculate the ownership structure were explored in this chapter based on the data of assets and paid-in capital from the communiqués of the first and second economic censuses in order to estimate whether the publicly-owned assets were still “in quantitative dominance”, i.e., over 50% of the total social assets, by analyzing the changes in the ownership structure between the two censuses. At the same time, the contributions of the publicly- and non-publicly-owned economies to employment and output (GDP) were quantified, and in particular, the advantages the economy with mixed ownership over the publicly- and non-publicly-owned were quantitatively evaluated.