Governmental-Owner Power Imbalance and Privatization

Privatization is defined as the sale of state-owned assets by governmental agencies to private investors (e.g., Megginson, Nash, Netter, and Poulsen, 2004; Villalonga, 2000). Research on privatization has focused on privatization techniques (e.g., share issue privatization or voucher privatization), social welfare, governmental commitments to economic development, and varieties of outcomes of privatizations. Most prior studies from the financial economics perspective take privatization as a natural research context to examine the function of capital markets, the impact of national institutional settings, and the differences between partial privatization and initial public offerings. Very little research, however, has examined the determinants of privatization from an organizational perspective. This dissertation proposes that privatization decisions of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are influenced by different interests in governmental agencies. Using the resource dependence theory, I studied the power relationships of SOEs and their governmental owners. Four panel databases of 206 pharmaceutical firms across eight years in China were combined to answer the research question of this dissertation: What is the role of power imbalance between different governmental owners in the privatization of an SOE? The results suggest that organizational effectiveness and efficiency of an SOE increase the likelihood of its privatization. Results also show that provincial governmental owners are more likely to privatize SOEs if they can successfully attract foreign direct investment projects. Furthermore, the likelihood of privatization increases with the power asymmetry between the provincial government and the central government but decreases with the degree of the defense mechanism used by SOEs