Financial Structure, Smes And Anti-Poverty

Small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs)are effective tools in the fight against poverty by creating lots of non-agricultural employments and increasing the poor’s income and improving their self-developed ability. However, SMEs have no access to capital, which may limit its anti-poverty effect. The conventional view attributes SMEs’financing constraints to SMEs as the demanders of the fund, but the suppliers of the fund deserve blame in the sense of the theory of optimal financial structure of the new structural economics. The theory underlines that the optimal financial structure should serve the needs of the optimal industrial structure. The factor endowment determines SMEs are the main enterprise-type of the optimal industrial structure in contemporary China, so the optimal financial structure could fully meet the demands of SMEs financing.On the basis of the theory of optimal financial structure of the new structural economics, we discussed SMEs’ anti-poverty effect and financing constraints, the relationship between financial structure and SMEs’ anti-poverty effect, and put forward the theoretical hypothesis. In this paper, financial structure means financing structure and banking structure, and financing structure measures the relative importance of financial markets and banks, and banking structure measures the relative importance of big banks and small and medium-sized banks (SMBs). Using the panel data for Chinese provinces from2005to2011, the empirical results shows that, financial structure exerts an important effect on anti-poverty through the channel of SMEs, which is especially reflected by the promotion effect of SMBs on SMEs’ anti-poverty effect. The researches implicate that banking structure should be adjusted to provide the space for the development of SMBs to achieve sustainable anti-poverty.