State Ownership and Labor Redundancy : Estimates Based on Enterprise-Level Data from Vietnam

Belser, Patrick ; Rama, Martin

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCOUNTING;    ASSETS;    AUDITS;    AUTONOMY;    CENTRAL PLANNING;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-2599
RP-ID  :  WPS2599

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Privatizing, or restructuringstate-owned enterprises, may lead to massive layoffs, butthe number of redundant workers is usually unknownbeforehand. The authors estimate labor redundancy bycomparing employment levels across enterprises withdifferent degrees of state ownership. In their model, stateenterprises are a hybrid between labor-managed enterprises,and profit-maximizing enterprises, with the profit motivebecoming less prominent as the state of capital increases.This model leads to an employment equation, that isestimated using an enterprise database from Vietnam. In thisdatabase, constructed especially for this paper, roughly athird of the enterprises are fully state-owned, a third arefully private, and a third are joint ventures between thestate, and the private sector. The employment equationscontrol for sector activity, region, and theenterprise's age, among other variables. The resultssuggest that if the state share of capital were brought downto zero, roughly half of the workers in the correspondingenterprises would be redundant. This is more than ten timesthe estimate by the current enterprise directors. Theresults also show a wide dispersion of redundancy acrosssectors of activity. There is only a weak correlationbetween estimated labor redundancy, and twelve ad hocindicators of profitability, productivity, and labor cost.But the correlation between most ad hoc indicators also isweak, suggesting that these indicators are not reliabletools for identifying the most overstaffed enterprises.