بازار سهام در چین: روند تنظیم درون زا در پاسخ به خواسته های اصلاحات اقتصادی و رشد

Evaluations of China's stock market range from extremely favourable assessments that emphasise GDP growth rates, financial depth or the rapid growth of privatisation to extremely negative assessments that favour market efficiency or short-term profitability to the exclusion of alternative interpretations. This paper investigates the stock market performance in China through an overview of the rationale and events underpinning its development and by exploring the hypothesis that the co-evolution of stock market alongside financial development is in no way limited to attaining market efficiency. The paper argues that China's stock market, which is mainly accessible to large state-owned enterprises (SOEs), can be seen as adaptive and effective if its emergence and rapid development are understood as an endogenous adjustment process of financial development in response to both the demands of economic growth and changes in political constraints. The findings of this study present a conceptual model of China's stock market efficiency that takes into account the country's idiosyncratic social, economic and political environments. The paper contributes to the literature by offering a holistic view of the role of historical developments, policy initiatives, investors’ behaviour and the economic aspirations of China as they pertain to stock market efficiency.

The stock market in China has developed rapidly since the early 1990s, with the establishment of the Shanghai Stock Exchange and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange. In 2007, the Chinese stock market overtook the Japanese market in terms of capitalization and topped the world in initial public offerings (IPO), underlining the dramatic surge in the country's financial sector. Nonetheless, within one year the Chinese stock market plunged to less than a third of the value it held at its peak. This marks the most rapid decline of any major market in the world even against the backdrop of a global financial crisis. The high level of volatility and the rapid growth of the Chinese stock market have attracted numerous empirical studies that have focused on market operation and efficiency. The traditional concept of the efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) has been widely used to explore the market efficiency of shares traded on the two Chinese stock exchanges. The literature shows that there have been departures from weak-form efficiency in terms of predictability or returns on the basis of their own past values (Fifield and Jetty, 2008 and Groenewold et al., 2001). Wang, Burton, and Power (2004) concluded that, over the observed period in their study, the conventional impression that there is greater efficiency in the pricing of domestically owned equities, namely A shares, is also open to debate. That being said, it is not realistic to expect China to meet market efficiency criteria that are more relevant to a developed market economy—a stage China has clearly not yet attained. The difficulty facing China is in implementing regulatory changes in a rapidly evolving economy that are consistent with her political, social and economic objectives and realities. There is no doubt that regulatory changes that improve information quality will lead to prices impounding information more rapidly, improving market efficiency. This paper investigates and extrapolates on the assessment of the Chinese stock market presented by Maswana (2008) and Park (2004) by considering the hypothesis that a co-evolving stock market as an aspect of financial development is in no way limited to attaining market efficiency. Rather, the workability of this emerging capital market depends on whether it is compatible with economic reform and growth targets. The economic direction of China's quasi open market economy is still strongly influenced by the state. Keynes (1936) stated that stock valuation might not necessarily be an estimate of the fair value of stocks, but rather a convention that provides the necessary stability and liquidity for investment. According to Keynes (1936, p. 152), ‘the essence of this convention, though it does not, of course, work out so simply, lies in the assumption that the existing state of affairs will continue indefinitely, in so far as we have specific reasons to expect a change’. In this context, the ‘state of affairs’ is very much influenced by the state in the Chinese economy, including the growth targets of the government. The structure of this paper is as follows: the next Section 2 provides a brief review of the theory of financial development. Section 3 outlines China's financial reform and the need to establish a stock market in China. Sections 4 and 5 detail the development phases of the stock market as an endogenous adjustment process responding to reform and growth targets. Section 6 discusses the effectiveness of the stock market, while the final Section 7 presents the conclusion and suggests directions for further research.

The Chinese Government views the stock market as crucial to the country's economic development. While direct credit control remains a monetary policy tool, the emergence of market-oriented shares has provided an alternative to bank finance and a market-based mechanism that is capable of facilitating reform in the public sector of the Chinese economic system. Given the predominance of individual investors and their speculative and short-term orientation, China's stock market is renowned for its high levels of volatility. However, these defects are mostly not related to policy. Rather, they reflect the current stage of Chinese economic development, or the fixed costs associated with constructing a well-developed market infrastructure (Maswana, 2008). To date, China's stock market has been adaptive and effective, if we regard the emergence and rapid development of this market as part of financial development as well as an endogenous adjustment process that responds to both the demands of economic growth and changes in political constraints (Park, 2004). Any credible evaluation of China's stock market needs to focus on understanding the coherence of the market in terms of the country's developmental goals. The experience of China also reveals that the government must play an important role in times of uncertainty, as many Western governments did in the global financial crisis and are still doing in the current European debt crisis. This role should primarily focus on macroeconomic stability. It is worth noting that the line between economic realism and ideological belief remains blurred in the Chinese market. The ‘market optimum’ in the Chinese context, consistent with Park (2004) and Maswana's (2008) contention, may not necessarily reflect the ideal by mature market standards because the Chinese economy remains structurally underdeveloped and is still undergoing a gradual market transformation from a centrally planned to an open market economy. The Chinese stock market will become more advanced and sophisticated over time and will then be in a better position to abide by international standards of performance. It should also be noted that the research method applied in this study was chosen because of the limitations imposed by data availability and the findings drawn from this approach will mean different outcomes in different settings. Thus, an important extension to this study would be to determine the empirical robustness of these findings in different contexts, entailing different definitions, different measurements and different durations of research based on the objectives of the evaluations.