Quantitative Estimation on Dominance of China’s Public Economy

Abstract

In the last chapter, the data of total assets from two national economic censuses were used to measure the shares of the public and non-public sectors to fully depict their roles in the national economy; at the same time, the capital of legal units was dissembled and grouped into publicly- and non-publicly-owned according to the ratio of the two ownership forms of the paid-in capital, which fixed the problems that had long been associated with studies on the capital ownership structure; subsequently, the ownership structure of the total assets and the paid-in capital of the secondary and tertiary industries were calculated, and the final results showed that in the two industries, the publicly- and non-publicly-owned assets accounted for 52.46 and 47.54% of the total assets, respectively. The calculations and results offered quantitative evidence for the dominant status of China’s publicly-owned economy as well as an apparatus for further studies. However, the data employed, i.e., two national economic censuses, had obvious problems in that there was a long interval between the two censuses and the information on the ownership structure, especially the status of the publicly-owned economy, was not constantly watched. Such a lack of continuous data may mislead policy makers in their judgement on the economic situation, which, if the dominance of the publicly-owned economy is overestimated, may lead further ownership adjustment to harm the dominance, or, alternatively, may halt further reform and the economy is harmed if underestimated. In addition, although total assets tell us the total amount of economic resources controlled by each form of ownership and are thus the best indicator of the status of the public ownership, they are difficult to get and are only available in economic censuses. Therefore, it is of vital importance to fill in the gaps between censuses with publicly-available data and indicators. Meanwhile, another unresolved problem in Chap. 5 is how to define the ownership structure of the primary industry. There has been no comprehensive estimation on it because, (1) the calculations are very difficult, and (2) there are no available data for the primary industry like those from economic censuses. We have tried to tackle these problems. In this chapter, we built up on the results of Chap. 5 and extended our estimations on the asset ownership in the secondary and tertiary industries to later years that had not yet been covered in economic censuses. We also attempted to calculate the ownership structure of the assets of the primary industry. Combining efforts in the two aspects, we offered a whole picture of the public and non-public sectors in the entire national economy.