Research On Marketization, Industrial Cluster And SME Financing Constraints

The financing constraints of small and medium-sized enterprises(SMEs) have alwaysbeen interested by foreign and domestic scholars. When considering factors which areinfluencing SMEs’ financing constraints, foreign literatures have covered macro and microaspects. Domestic scholars mainly discussed this topic from the macro external perspectivelike financial development, and several from micro internal aspects. However, there is fewdomestic literatures discussing the meso factors like industrial cluster. In the current theory,SME industrial clusters can help alleviate the information asymmetry between financialinstitutions and a single enterprise and reduce the information researching costs offinancial institutions, so as to avoid the adverse selection beforehand and moral hazardafterward. They also can improve the SME credibility, lower the transaction costs ofinvestors and then enhance the financing ability of SMEs in the industrial clusters.We decided to analyse the SME financing constraints from the industrial clusterperspective which is a meso factor. After integrating the previous financial constrainttheories and based on information asymmetry theory, this paper find that the mechanism ofindustrial clusters alleviating SME financing constraints is to promote the formation ofSMEs’ reputation, deliver positive signals to the external world through informationtransmission and reduce information costs of financial institutions. Thus industrial clusterswill attract more financial institutions to provide loans to the inside SMEs. After theoreticalanalysis, we use data of listed SMEs from the SME board between2004and2007andstochastic frontier model to empirically analyse the relationship between industrial clusterand SME financing constraints. During the following research, we bring the marketization,an important factor affecting the formation of industrial clusters, in that relationship. Weconsider that high marketization would contribute to the industrial clusters’ development and therefore reduce the SME financing constraints. The empirical result shows thatindustrial clusters in areas of higher marketization will play a stronger role in alleviatingSMEs’ financing constraints.