Privatisation in China: softly, softly does it

India’s halting attempts at privatisation and its preference, for the most part, for disinvestment have been roundly criticised by many as being inadequate. A more aggressive privatisation drive, it is contended, would make for superior economic performance. In popular discourse, China’s privatisation efforts are often compared favourably with India’s. This paper examines China’s record of privatisation to see whether it accords with popular perceptions. The record shows that China has been proceeded cautiously in its privatisation efforts. It has privatised – that is, sold off to private owners- only the smaller SOEs. The state retains control over the larger SOEs that dominate industrial output and profits. In respect of these, China has opted for gradual disinvestment with disinvested shares residing mostly with state-owned entities. Over a long period, China has pushed through reforms of SOEs, including conferment of greater autonomy on enterprises and introduction of incentives for workers and managers. The empirical evidence is that performance at SOEs has improved consequent to these reforms. It could be argued that full-blooded privatisation might have produced even better results. However, given the possible implications in terms of job losses as well as the absence of effective governance mechanisms in China’s underdeveloped capital market. China’s rulers may well have been justified in hastening slowly with privatisation.

Instant restore after a media failure

Media failures usually leave database systems unavailable for several hours until recovery is complete, especially in applications with large devices and high transaction volume. Previous work introduced a technique called single-pass restore, which increases restore bandwidth and thus substantially decreases time to repair. Instant restore goes further as it permits read/write access to any data on a device undergoing restore--even data not yet restored--by restoring individual data segments on demand. Thus, the restore process is guided primarily by the needs of applications, and the observed mean time to repair is effectively reduced from several hours to a few seconds. This paper presents an implementation and evaluation of instant restore. The technique is incrementally implemented on a system starting with the traditional ARIES design for logging and recovery. Experiments show that the transaction latency perceived after a media failure can be cut down to less than a second and that the overhead imposed by the technique on normal processing is minimal. The net effect is that a few "nines" of availability are added to the system using simple and low-overhead software techniques