Performance of domestic and foreign-invested enterprises in China

Despite increasing attention paid to China's enterprise reform since the late 1970s, relatively little is known about the performance of reformed state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and newly formed private firms vis-à-vis foreign firms in China. In this study, we examine the performance of domestic Chinese firms in various ownership categories versus foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) based on two nation-wide surveys conducted by the National Bureau of Statistics in 1998 and 2002. We found that both domestic non-state-owned firms and foreign-invested enterprises performed better than state-owned enterprises. Meanwhile, three categories of Chinese firms—privately owned, collectively owned, and shareholding—had higher performance levels than the foreign-invested enterprises.