Study On Rural Small And Medium-sized Enterprises' Credit Availability From The Perspective Of Social Capital

In China, the difficulty in rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing is a long-standing problem. However, for the informal finance and formal finance co-exist in rural credit markets, only the use of economic theory or separate informal and formal credit market to study small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing in rural areas seems inadequate. It's obvious that rural small and medium-sized enterprises as the organizations embedded in the rural acquaintances or, at least, semi-acquaintances society have made their credit financing bear a remarkable sociality, and the non-economic factors such as blood, kinship and geopolitical relations have become the important ones to impact the enterprises credit financing. Based on the above considerations, the thesis chooses to study the availability of rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing from the perspective of social capital, so as to make up for the deficiencies of the traditional researches, and to offer new ideas and realistic approaches to overcome the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing plight from a new perspective.The theme of this research is to apply social capital theory to study the mechanism of rural small and medium-sized enterprises obtaining credit financing, and to empirically analyze the influence of social capital on the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'informal and formal credits availability. Its major contents of research are included as follows. (1) The business owners'social capital is defined in applicability. According to the data from questionnaire, the business owners'social capital is described in the regard of three social capital components such as the business owners'social relationship network, trust and norms, and the business owners'social capital characteristics are summarized to offer the analytical framework in theory of social capital for this research. (2) In the regard of business owners'social capital, the mechanism of rural small and medium-sized enterprises obtaining informal and formal credit financing is detected so as to offer the theoretical basis for the empirical study of this thesis. (3) Sampling data and typical cases are used to analyze the influence of business owners'social capital on the rural small and medium–sized enterprises'informal and formal credits availability, so as to offer the empirical support for this thesis'theoretical research. (4) The policies to deal with the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing difficulties are proposed from the perspective of social capital.This thesis combines the normative study and empirical study, the qualitative and quantitative methods to study the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit availability. In the empirical research, Chapter III analyzes the current status and characteristics of rural small and medium-sized business owners'social capital by the use of descriptive statistical method. Chapter V analyzes the factors of the business owners'social capital by the method of factor analysis, and extracts seven public factors of the business owners'social capital by the method of principal component analysis. Furthermore, the collected factor values are taken to conduct Logistic regression test to verify the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'informal and formal credit availability. Chapter VI proves the influence of the business owners'social capital on the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit availability with the classified cases by the method of multi-cases study.This thesis, through theoretical and empirical research, has attained the following major conclusions. (1) Business owners'social capital as a whole has a significant effect on rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing availability. The more traditional the social capital is, the more dependent on informal credit financing the enterprises are. The more modernized the social capital is, the easier the enterprises are to obtain formal credits. (2) Of the social capital component indexes, acquaintances trust, general trust, norms have significant positive effects on the enterprises'informal credit financing availability, other social capital component indexes do not impact the enterprises'informal credit financing availability significantly. (3) The negative effects of traditional social capital make it difficult for the enterprises to break through their dependence on informal credit financing. (4) Of the social capital component indexes, three variables such as net top, trust from acquaintances, loan cognition influence the enterprises'formal credit availability significantly and positively. The influence of other two variables, general trust and norms, are also significant, but negative. Other social capital component indexes affect the enterprises'formal credit financing availability insignificantly. (5) The integration of social capital plays an important role in the enterprises'obtaining loans from formal financial institutions.It is a new attempt to systematically study rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing availability from the perspective of social capital. Therefore, this thesis has some ground-breaking researches and has tried to achieve the following innovations. Firstly, 24 feasible indexes are used to actually measure the rural small and medium-sized business owners'social capital in an all-round way.Secondly, the mechanism for the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'embedding-dependence on informal credit financing is explored from the perspective of social capital, and the social capital mechanism for the rural small and medium-sized enterprises to overcome the formal credit financing barriers is analyzed, so as to form a perfect theoretical perspective of social capital to analyze rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing. Thirdly, the factor analysis and Logistic regression model are used to investigate the effect of social capital on the rural small and medium-sized enterprises'credit financing availability so as to bring about the innovation of research methods application. Fourthly, the policies to deal with the enterprises'credit financing difficulties are proposed from a new perspective of social capital.Of course, social capital, as a new perspective to study enterprises'credit financing, still has much for further research. For example, because of the difficulties of data availability and study, some conclusions can not be put into direct data test, and they have to be proved by typical cases only. Therefore, how to collect data to extend the range of application of the research conclusions is worth further exploration. Meanwhile it only deals with a major part of enterprises'social capital to analyze rural small and medium-sized enterprises credit financing based on business owners'social capital. And how to conduct a further systematic analysis of the impact of enterprises'social capital on the rural small and medium-sized enterprises credit financing availability in an all-round way becomes the future research direction.