SHANGHAI, Jan. 21 — China said over the weekend that the last of four big state-owned banks would be financially restructured to prepare it for a public stock listing.

An urban branch of the Agricultural Bank of China in Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi Province. The bank's emphasis has been in the rural regions.

Three of the largest banks sold shares in 2005 and 2006, offerings that raised more than $40 billion and were among the most successful initial public stock issues anywhere.

The fourth financial institution, the Agricultural Bank of China, which has more than $500 billion in assets and upward of 500,000 employees, could go public as soon as next year, some analysts said.

The bank, which is closely tied to the country's struggling rural economy, was once dismissed as a candidate for public listing because it was China's most troubled bank. It has had the largest percentage of problem loans, or loans that are not producing income, and a record of fraud and mismanagement.

But at a high-level financial working group conference in Beijing, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao announced on Saturday that the Agricultural Bank's overhaul and listing would be pushed forward.

The decision, reported by state-run news media, did not come as a complete surprise. Many analysts had predicted that the Beijing authorities would press for the revamping and public listing of the bank, amid calls by foreign investors for stakes in China's banking industry.

In the last two years, some of the world's largest financial institutions — including Citigroup , UBS , HSBC , Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch — have invested billions of dollars to acquire minority stakes in big Chinese state-controlled banks ahead of public listings.

For many of those investors, the value of their investments soared after the three other state-owned banks went public in Hong Kong and Shanghai in 2005 and 2006. In October, for instance, the largest of them, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, raised about $21.6 billion in what was the largest initial public offering in history. The two others to sell shares were the China Construction Bank and the Bank of China.

The feverish demand for Chinese banking stocks comes despite the mismanagement, corruption and poor lending practices. Some of the state-owned institutions were considered virtually insolvent five years ago, before the government began wiping debt off their books.

Investors are betting that China's efforts to revamp its big banks will bolster profits and allow the banks to benefit from the country's spectacular economic growth.

The government has spent five years and more than $400 billion purging bad loans from the books of the four leading state banks, helping prepare them to become shareholder corporations.

The Agricultural Bank is widely thought to be the toughest sell. The bank listed $93 billion in problem loans in 2005, or 26 percent of all loans.

Another challenge is that the bank, which is policy-driven, has put priority on the needs of China's 900 million farmers and other rural residents.

Last year, the National Audit Office said it had found more than $6 billion in “irregularities” at the bank in 2004, including problem loans, fraudulent debt securities and suspicious activities.