Chinese colleagues often ask me about Australian state-owned enterprises. In reply, I contrast the Department of Finance’s webpage that lists Australia’s seven government business enterprises with the website of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the Chinese state council and its 106 central state-owned enterprise (SOEs). I point out that Australian government business enterprises are constituted for quite specific and narrow purposes, while central SOEs can be sprawling conglomerates with hundreds of subsidiaries. At a state level, I say that SOEs are mostly involved in public utilities, not the plethora of sectors in which Chinese provincial SOEs operate.
While state ownership in Australia has never been as extensive as in China, it wasn’t always so spartan. This morning, I stumbled across a 1993 book of “Stu
dent Economics Briefs” by Dr David Clark, based on essays published in the Australian Financial Review. One page describes Australia’s state sector as it was in the early 1990s. Not too long ago, Australia’s 240 government business enterprises contributed 10 per cent of GDP, controlled 20 per cent of capital stock, and undertook 15 per cent of investment.
A Natural History of Chinese State-owned Enterprises (SOEs) 