توسعه مالی و رشد اقتصادی: شواهد اخیر از چین

Using data from 286 Chinese cities over the period 2001–2006, this paper investigates the relationship between financial development and economic growth at the city level in China. Our results from both traditional cross-sectional regressions and first-differenced and system GMM estimators for dynamic panel data suggest that most traditional indicators of financial development are positively associated with economic growth. This result runs contrary to the existing conclusion that a state-ruled banking sector, such as that in China, hinders economic growth because of the distorting nature of the government. Since we focus on the years after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 while the existing studies mainly covered the years before 2001, our finding suggests that the financial reforms that have taken place after China’s accession to the WTO are in the right direction. To examine the sensitivity of our results, different conditioning information sets are experimented with. Our results are shown to be robust.

This paper investigates the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth in China. China has been experiencing fast economic growth and rapid expansion of financial intermediation in the last 30 years. Since the start of its reforms in 1978, the Chinese economy has maintained an annual growth rate of 9.8% in real terms (China Statistical Yearbook 2007), while the total loans outstanding in its financial institutions relative to GDP has increased from 51% to 107% (China Compendium of Statistics, 1949–2004; China Statistical Yearbook 2007). As the largest emerging market and with many years of uninterrupted fast growth, China presents us with an interesting case for study. One fundamental question is: what is the relationship between financial development and economic growth in China? A unique feature of this paper is that our empirical investigation is based on a rich set of city-level data, in contrast to existing studies that are based on national or provincial datasets.

This paper examines the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth in China, using data from 286 Chinese cities over the period 2001–2006. We investigate the exogenous component of financial development on economic growth using system GMM estimators for dynamic panel data. This technique yields the same results as the traditional cross-sectional estimators and the simpler first-differenced GMM estimators. We study an empirical relationship between various measures of financial development and economic growth with a unique city-level dataset. Our results suggest that traditionally used indicators of financial development are generally positively associated with economic growth after controlling for many factors associated with growth. The size and depth of the financial sector spur economic growth. With more use of markets and profit-oriented financial transactions and mobilization of corporate deposits, the development of financial intermediation in China after the WTO entry positively influences economic growth in China. These results are consistent with most cross-country studies on the relationship between financial intermediation and economic growth, but run contrary to existing studies on China that suggests that financial development hinders economic growth due to the distorting nature of the state-ruled banking sector. Thus, our findings suggest that the banking reforms after China’s accession to the WTO are in the right direction.