“以税增信”是否有助于小微企业贷款?——来自“银税互动”政策的证据

Can Using Tax Credit for Financing Help Small Businesses Access Bank Loans?Empirical Evidence from the Policy of Tax Credit Bank Loans

小微企业融资难融资贵是世界性难题,中国尝试将企业"纳税信用"转化为"融资信用",以数据互联共享和税务信用贷款为基础来缓解这一难题,实施推广了"银税互动"政策。本文基于2015—2017年浙江省的小微企业月度动态调查数据库,考察了银税互动政策对小微企业融资的影响。研究发现,该政策显著提高了小微企业平均的银行贷款可得性与贷款额度,贷款成本的下降在开展初期并不显著,在后期有所显现。享受这一政策红利的主体是小型企业,微型企业平均而言没有明显受益,但其内部的信贷分配有显著变化;银税互动信贷配给更偏向政策前无贷款、流动资金不足的企业;纳税信用评级为A、纳税额高的企业更容易受益。此外,银税互动的效果随银行密度和银企距离显著变化,意味着银税互动政策的效果与降低信息不对称和交易成本有关。政策效果还会随当地经济发展而变化。这些发现为"以税增信"这一新思路以及政策实践的可行性提供了事实依据和完善方向。

Financing for micro enterprises is a world-wide challenge. It is generally difficult for micro enterprises to acquire bank loans and the cost of getting loans is often high for them. The conundrum results from two major reasons: asymmetric information and high transaction cost(relative to its return). Various policies have been implemented to address the challenge in many countries, but the effects of most policies are not satisfactory. These traditional solutions mostly emphasize the role of financial intermediates or small financial institutions, and follow the model of collecting more information by increasing cost input, reducing banks’ cost of loan default by emphasizing mortgage or assurance, and rationing loans case by case. These solutions did not reduce transaction costs effectively. Since 2015, the Chinese government has piloted a project named tax credit bank loans(TCBL) to improve financing for micro enterprises. The project enforces data sharing of enterprises’ tax credit between the tax bureau and banks to reduce banks’ cost of collecting important information on enterprises. It also transforms the tax credit of enterprises into financing credit, encourages offering mortgage-free loans solely based on(tax) credit, and recommends digitalization of the loan rationing model to automatize loan application and online loan approval. All these elements can promote the scale-up of lending to micro enterprises, which is crucial for reducing the average transaction cost for each individual loan. This project is different from the traditional solutions to the financing challenge for micro enterprises, as it emphasizes on reducing information cost, focusing on credit rather than mortgage or assurance, and promoting large-scale expansion. However, how effective this project has been on improving the financing of micro enterprises is largely unknown. Based on the Micro Enterprises Dynamic Survey in Zhejiang Province and taxpayer credit information of enterprises in the State Taxation Administration of China during 2015-2017, this paper evaluates how the TCBL project affected bank financing for micro enterprises. We exploit the fact that different cities in Zhejiang promoted the program at a different pace, and construct a difference-in-differences framework to identify the causal effect of the TCBL on financing of micro enterprises.We find that the project significantly improved the average availability and amount of bank loans for micro enterprises. The reduction on the cost of loans was not significant at the early stage of the project implementation, but started to emerge at the later stage. Small enterprises rather than micro enterprises were the major beneficiary, as micro enterprises on average were not significantly affected by the TCBL;but the loan allocation within micro enterprises was significantly changed. Loans under the TCBL were more likely allocated to enterprises who had acquired no bank loans or who faced a lack of cash flow. A-level tax credit and more tax payment also helped access bank loans. Finally, we find that the effect of TCBL changed with the intensity of local banks and the distance between banks and enterprises, which supports the argument that the TCBL effect is related to its effect on reducing asymmetric information and transaction cost. The effect of TCBL also varied with local economic development. Our results are robust to different situations. Overall, TCBL is successful in improving financing of micro enterprises.Our contribution to the literature is three-fold. First, to our knowledge, this is the first paper that rigorously quantifies the effects of the TCBL project on micro enterprises’ financing. Second, we not only evaluate the average effect of the TCBL project on loan access, but also the heterogenous effect on loan rationing. Third, we analyze the fundamental mechanisms for the TCBL project and provide evidence for the argument that the project is related to the reduction in asymmetric information and transaction costs. Our findings provide evidence for the feasibility and benefits of applying policies that exploit the idea of using tax credit for micro enterprises’ financing problems on the base of data sharing. The results also indicate the directions for potential improvement. We would argue that the TCBL project is an important and innovative experiment for addressing the financing problems for micro enterprises. Our evidence for its success is valuable and can be inspiring for other countries. It is worth to highlight that our evaluation is based on the data in first two years of project implementation and only analyzes the effect on loan access. Further research is needed on how effective the TCBL project can be in the long run or when it is expanded to a much larger scale, and how the program affects the development of micro enterprises.