The job losses of privatized firms and firms with diversified ownership are 35 percent lower than the job losses of wholly state-owned enterprises (SOEs), a recent survey showed.

Assaad Jabre, executive deputy president of the International Finance Cooperation, said that an analysis made by Chinese and Australian experts has found the SOE restructuring, mainly through privatization and ownership diversification, has been an effective way to reduce China's laid-off workers.

Although SOEs dismiss large numbers of workers at the beginning of the restructuring, they tend to keep more workers in the following years. As a result, workers laid off by restructured firms turn out to be less than those un-restructured SOEs, Jabre said.

According to the survey, the layoff rate of wholly state-owned firms is 15 percentage points more than of the state-hold firms, and 12.4 percentage points more than private firms from 1995 to 2001.

Moreover, the restructured firms pay their workers more timely than the unstructured SOEs.

China has been implementing reforms in its state enterprises over the past two decades.

According to study conducted by experts of Australian National University and Beijing University, the number of state-owned industrial firms dropped to 27,000 in early 2005 from 114,000 in 1996.

Source: Xinhua