No abstract

This paper examines empirically the net impact of residual state ownership on privatized firm efficiency in the transitional context of Vietnam. Vietnamese privatization has its own characteristics. Instead of mass and full privatization, Vietnam has chosen a partial and gradual path. Thus, it is important to assess the net impact of residual state ownership on privatized firms during the post-privatization period. This study employs stochastic frontier analysis to investigate the association between residual state ownership and the efficiency of privatized firms, using a sample of all privatized firms that are listed on the Vietnamese stock exchanges over the period from 2007 to 2017. Also, two-stage least squares regression is incorporated into the model to deal with potential endogeneity issues. Our study provides evidence that state ownership should not be considered as a pure source of agency problems. Indeed, the net impact of residual state ownership on privatized firm efficiency is non-monotonic, and the relationship between residual state ownership and privatized firm efficiency is under an inverted U-shape. A moderate level (less than 50%) of residual state ownership might be beneficial to privatized firm efficiency whereas too much state ownership is detrimental to the efficiency of privatized firms.

To enhance the performance of privatized firms and state-owned enterprises, Vietnamese government set up a specialized monitoring body named State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC) in 2006 to supervise their performance. This motivated us to conduct this study to investigate the effective control of SCIC on privatized firms' performance. We collected the annual reports of 500 non-financial privatized firms listed on HSX and HNX during the period from 2007 to 2017 from Thomson Reuters. Observations with missing values were removed and trimming outliers were implemented resulting in a dataset comprising of 4146 firm-year observations. We applied a quadratic regression model of state ownership on firms' performance, and applied the method of Baron and Kenny (1986) to test the moderating effect of SCIC control. To fix "selection bias" that may occur and result in endogeneity of moderator (M), we utilized the PSM technique to analyze the marginal effect of the moderator (SCIC) on privatized firms' performance. Our findings indicate a positive moderating role of SCIC on the relationship between the state ownership and firms' performance. This implies that there is a positive effect of liberating the management of the private firms from government control, which also means that lesser the intervention of government in the day to day operational activities of a private firm, better the performance of a privatized firm is.

Privatization has played an important role in national economic reform in Vietnam. However, unlike other transitional countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Vietnam has chosen a partial and gradual privatization where the government still holds significant ownership in most privatized firms. Whether partial privatization can enhance privatized firms’ performance or full privatization should have been implemented is a critical question that needs to be answered. This paper utilizes semiparametric regressions to study the relationship between residual state ownership and firm performance. The results indicate an inverted U relationship between state ownership and firm performance. We show that the performance of privatized firms improves with an increase in the level of state ownership until around 40%, after which the effect of state ownership on firm performance tends to decline. This demonstrates that in a transitional context, relinquishing governmental control via privatization can significantly benefit privatized firm performance. However, further reduction of state ownership may decrease the performance of privatized firms. Overall, the study contributes significantly to the growing body of evidence on the nonlinear effects of state ownership. This suggests that in the transitional context of Vietnam, due to weak corporate governance and limited protection of minority shareholders, there could be a temporary optimal position where state and private investors hold balanced ownership to simultaneously supervise operations and promote the performance of privatized firms.