赶超战略与大银行垄断——基于新结构经济学的视角

改革开放初期,中国有很多资本高度密集的大型国有企业,需要大量资金维持生产运营,若无法获得足够的银行贷款以致资金链断裂而破产倒闭,极易引发动荡。本文研究发现,在当时中国资本稀缺的要素禀赋结构下,为确保“重要而不能倒”的国有企业获得足够的银行贷款而不破产倒闭,不适合采用放开银行准入以促使银行竞争的方式,反而应限制银行准入,控制银行数量。原因在于,放开银行准入增加的仅是中小银行,其资金动员能力有限,与国有企业的规模特性不相匹配,更重要的是,大量中小银行进入会分流大银行的存款,降低大银行的资金动员及服务国有企业的能力,导致国有企业的贷款成本和破产风险因此而上升。本文指出,一个国家的银行业结构内生于该国的经济发展战略。限制银行准入的政策安排通过在金融方面支持国有企业,在改革初期起到了维护国防安全、保障国计民生和维持社会经济稳定的作用,为平稳推动改革创造了条件。

Catch-Up Strategy and Banking Structure: The Perspective of New Structural Economics

Since the start of its economic reform and opening-up in 1978, China has witnessed rapid economic growth. However, this development has been unbalanced, and in the financial market, this imbalance is evidenced by inadequate and expensive financing for small and medium-sized firms, in contrast to the easily obtainable, low-cost funding available to large firms. The literature proposes that small banks can more effectively meet the financing needs of small and medium-sized firms than big banks. China's banking sector is dominated by four state-owned big banks, and entry into the industry is strictly regulated by the government. What drove the Chinese government to restrict the entry of new banks into the industry？ Considering China's rapid and sustained economic growth and the lack of a systemic financial crisis in the past four decades, is it economically rational for the government to restrict bank entry and allow the banking system to be monopolized by big banks in the early stage of China's economic reform？This study argues that the deposits of big banks would be partially transferred to newly established small banks such that the total loanable funds available from big banks would sharply decline if the entry barriers to the banking sector were lowered, as capital and total fund supply were scarce in China in the early stages of reform and opening-up. Consequently, the financing costs of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) increase as credit availability decreases because SOEs have enormous capital needs, while newly established banks have a small asset scale and cannot provide large loans to diversify risks effectively. In this scenario, the government's intervention in the banking sector, or the entry barriers to new banks, becomes a sub-optimal arrangement.From a transaction cost perspective, this study discusses how the catch-up strategy determines the banking structure in a country using a static game that includes firms and banks of different sizes. The theoretical analysis in this study focuses on two types of transaction costs when banks lend to firms—contracting and information costs. Contracting costs refer to the real costs incurred when finalizing loan agreements. One key feature of contracting costs is that they nearly change with loan size and can be approximated as fixed costs. The larger the amount of a single loan, the greater the economies of scale, and the lower the contracting cost per unit of financing. Information costs refer to the costs resulting from information asymmetry, such as the labor costs of screening firms and banks' losses from loan defaults.This study shows that considering the contracting and information costs, big banks are in a better position to fund large firms because big banks have the economies of scale to lend to large firms with large capital demands, thereby lowering the transaction costs of financing. In contrast, if one or a few small banks provide large loans to a large firm, they take on a high risk of bankruptcy in the event of a loan default. If small banks are to diversify their investments or limit the sizes of single loans to reduce their risk of bankruptcy, large firms would have to borrow from multiple small banks simultaneously, which would sharply increase the transaction costs of financing.This study provides policy references for further reform and development of China's banking industry. China's industrial landscape is characterized by the presence of a large number of labor-intensive small firms. Hence, this study proposes that local small banks should be developed further and interest rates should be liberalized further to meet the financing needs of small firms.