State-owned enterprises in the Russian market: Ownership structure and their role in the economy

This article analyzes the ownership structure of state-owned companies and their role in the Russian economy. Using a sample of 114 of the largest Russian companies, we estimated direct and indirect state participation as a percentage of shareholdings for direct and indirect federal property during the time period of 2006–2014. We used two methods to estimate the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which allowed us to compare our results with OECD and Rosstat statistics for a broader sample of Russian companies owned by the public sector. This study revealed a decline in SOEs’ share in the capitalization of the Russian stock market and a slight increase in their share of total revenues and employment. The results indicated that public SOEs demonstrated significantly higher productivity compared to non-public SOEs and private companies had a distinct advantage in productivity compared with public SOEs. Despite the significant advantages in productivity of private companies over the SOEs, over a 9-year period, we observed that this gap narrowed. This may be due to conditions of high financial volatility and stagnation of the economy that result in certain advantages for SOEs in terms of access to sources of long-term funding and other forms of state support. However, SOEs with indirect state control experienced a rapid growth in revenue and productivity compared to other firms. This may indicate the presence of a specific stock selection mechanism for transferring more effective SOEs from direct state ownership to indirect control as an alternative to privatization.