Abstract: Optimizing the efficiency of market allocation of resources is not only an important channel to improve the quality of economic development, but also the underlying meaning of building a market system with higher standards. From the perspective of the total factor productivity distribution of enterprises, it is found that the higher the proportion of zombie enterprises in the market, the lower the efficiency of economic resources allocation among the normal enterprises. Further analysis shows that in the markets with higher proportion of assets of state-owned enterprises and belonging to the labor-intensive industries, zombie enterprises would lead to a greater degree of economic resource mismatch in these markets; while in the regions with higher degree of marketization and market integration, the markets can effectively resist the negative impact of resource mismatch caused by zombie enterprises. The result of a mechanism analysis shows that zombie enterprises’ behavior of occupying economic resources is more likely to hit high productivity enterprises, which is mainly manifested in the sharp decline of productivity growth and the significant increase of market exit probability. The above conclusions indicate that deepening the supply side structural reform should organically combine eliminating backward production capacity with optimizing the allocation of market resources, so as to comprehensively stimulate market vitality and promote the high-quality economic development to a new level.

Key words: resource allocation efficiency, total factor productivity distribution, zombie enterprises, high quality economic development