科研管理 ›› 2019, Vol. 40 ›› Issue (5): 254-263.

• 论文 • 上一篇    下一篇

官员访问与公司雇员

白云霞,王砚萍   

  1. 同济大学经济与管理学院,上海200092
  • 收稿日期:2017-01-03 修回日期:2019-02-25 出版日期:2019-05-20 发布日期:2019-05-21
  • 通讯作者: 白云霞
  • 基金资助:
    国家自然科学基金项目:“金融制度变迁与企业期限错配”(71472138,2015.01-2018.12)。

Official visits and corporate employee

Bai Yunxia, Wang Yanping   

  1. School of Economics and Management,Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
  • Received:2017-01-03 Revised:2019-02-25 Online:2019-05-20 Published:2019-05-21

摘要: 与以往很多从企业的角度出发,探讨企业建立政治关联以寻求政府保护的文献不同,本文从政府角度出发,研究政府官员如何主动通过访问企业来实现其就业目标。通过考察世界各国政府官员对Fortune公布的最新世界500强公司的访问情况,发现不同于西方市场经济国家,我国政府官员频繁访问企业,使得官员访问具有“中国特色”。具体到就业问题,实证结果表明,我国政府官员倾向于访问吸纳劳动力强的企业,访问后企业的雇员规模显著增加,尤其是大专以下的雇员数,从而导致员工冗余。在国有企业中,这种正相关系更为突出。

关键词: 官员访问, 公司雇员, 大专以下

Abstract: The relationship between government and enterprises has always been an important issue in academic research. In transition economies, how the government transforms its functions and how to build a new type of government-enterprise relationship have received wide attention. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most countries have fallen into recession. In order to boost the economy, governments of many countries have introduced various measures to strengthen the regulation of the market economy. Keynesianism and state interventionism have re-emerged. As a result, the academic community has implemented many new researches about the relationship between government and market. The boundary between government's macroeconomic regulation and the free market has once again become a research hot spot. Under such circumstance, it is more practical to study the relationship between government and enterprises. There are many theoretical references on political connections which represent the relationship between government and enterprises. However, due to the fact that the relationship between government and enterprises is difficult to measure, there are few researches on this problem. And most political connections researches examine how companies affect government policy making or resource allocation through executives with government background. These researches are from the perspective of enterprises. Since current government officials are not allowed to serve in the enterprise, the executives who measure political connections in previous researches are actually retired government officials. But actual controllers of resources are current government officials. Accordingly, it can be speculated that the reliability of the conclusions of such documents depends on the impact that retired or outgoing government officials can exert on the current government. With the advancement of political and economic reforms, the mobility of government officialsor local governors’ turnover has increased, and rotations across places have become common phenomena. The occupational risks of government officials have also increased. The news about officials being downgraded, dismissed and even expelled have been reported frequently from time to time. In such cases, the impact of retired or outgoing government officials on the current government department is yet to be verified. Fortunately, official visits with Chinese characteristics have provided us with a new perspective to study the political connections from government side. At present, there are a few papers studying Chinese official visits. They still proceed on enterprise side to investigate the benefits of official visits to enterprises from the perspectives of government subsidies, corporate alliances and corporate innovations. In this paper we start from the government side to study the reason that Chinese government officials visit companies frequently, and whether official visits will bring burdens to companies.Different from the papers which discuss how to seek protection of government by political connections from the angle of the companies, this paper studies how to achieve the social goals by official visits from the angle of government. Based on the comparison of government official visits from all over the world, this paper studies how Chinese government officials achieve political employment goals by visiting enterprises. The contributions of this paper are mainly reflected in the following five points. First, previous researches only pay attention to domestic official visits, and has not yet carried out comparative analysis from international level, and the description of Chinese official inspection is relatively simple. Through the official visits statistics of Fortune 500 global corporations, This paper presents a detailed description from the aspects of types, reasons and annual changes of official visits. By comparing official visits from all over the world, it is found that government officials in developed market economies rarely visit enterprises, but Chinese officials visit enterprises frequently, forming “Chinese Characteristics” visit phenomenon. From the institutional level, an in-depth analysis is presented why official visits have Chinese characteristics, that is, they shoulder heavy employment goals. Second, this paper uses employment goals as an entry point to examine the motivation of official visits from the perspective of the government. Measuring the labor absorption capacity by the employment elasticity coefficient, it is found that government officials tend to choose enterprises with strong labor absorption capacity as the target of visit. In addition, enterprises with large number of employees are also the targets of government officials, even if the potential of such enterprises to increase labor is limited. However, stabilizing the size of its existing staff, reducing or even eliminating layoffs, will also play a vital role in stabilizing employment in the region. Third, companies that arevisited by officials have the responsibility to help government achieve its social goals in labor employment, which is manifested by the recruitment of a large number of low-skilled employees. The rapid increase in the number of low-skilled employees exceeds the need for business expansion, resulting in employee redundancy. Fourth, when government officials visit state-owned enterprises, state-owned enterprise executives are more motivated to complete this political task in order to obtain political promotion. Compared with non-state-owned enterprises, this positive correlation between official visits and employee scale is more prominent in state-owned enterprises. Fifth, in areas with higher employment goals, government officials are subject to greater employment pressure, and the employee effect and redundancy effect of official visits are more significant.In conclusion, developed market economies officials rarely visit enterprises, but Chinese officials visit enterprises frequently, forming “Chinese Characteristics” visit phenomenon. As to employment issue, the empirical findings show that the officials are inclined to visit the corporations which can absorb more employees. Official visits can increase the number of employees, especially for employees with college degree or below, thus incurring redundant employee. This relation is much stronger in state-owned enterprises and provinces with high employment goals. The results of this paper show that while government officials set macroeconomic goals such as increasing employment rates, they must also consider the labor allocation efficiency of enterprises in order to better develop China's labor market.

Key words: official visits, corporate employee, college degree or below