“Double-edged Sword” Effect of Banking Competition on the Export Quality Upgrading of Chinese Enterprises：Based on Dual Perspectives of Quality Adjustment and Export Entry

Abstract

In recent years, with the rise of trade protectionism and the surging of economic globalization, the focus of China’s export trade has shifted from quantity expansion to quality improvement. In this context, improving the export quality of enterprises has become an important part of China’s transformation from a big trading country to a powerful trading country. For enterprises, adequate financial support is the basic premise of quality upgrading. Then, in China, where enterprise funds are mainly from bank loans, the improvement of export quality is naturally inseparable from the support of the banking system. Therefore, how to put forward the new path of upgrading the export quality of Chinese enterprises from the perspective of banks is not only related to the implementation effect of China’s trade power strategy, but also the important connotation of constructing the mechanism of “financial services to the real economy”. Based on this, this paper analyzes the impact of banking competition on the export quality of Chinese enterprises from the “financial services real economy” perspective. Based on the heterogeneous enterprise trade model, we construct a theoretical model of banking competition affecting the product quality of export enterprises. Then we use the data from China’s Industrial Enterprise Database and China’s Customs Database to do the empirical tests, the result shows that: Firstly, banking competition plays a “double-edged sword” effect on the export quality of Chinese enterprises. Specifically, banking competition eases the financing constraints of Chinese enterprises, which on the one hand promotes export enterprises to upgrade the product quality, on the other hand causes a large number of low-quality enterprises to enter the export market, and finally makes banking competition inhibit the upgrading of the average export quality of Chinese enterprises. Secondly, compared with urban commercial banks and foreign banks, state-owned banks and joint-equity banks have a greater positive effect on the export quality of enterprises. Thirdly, the reformation of banking system in 2003 has greatly reduced the negative impact of banking competition on export quality. In particular, the impact of banking competition on the export quality of state-owned enterprises was significantly positive after 2003. These conclusions not only enrich the relevant research literature of banking competition and export quality, but also provide new empirical evidence for the economic effect of China’s banking joint-stock system reform, which has important practical significance for the banking industry to better play the role of serving the real economy and helping the high-quality development of China’s export trade.