Depressed access to formal finance and the use of credit card debt in Chinese SMEs

Nana Xu, Yan Yuan and Zhao Rong

China Economic Review, 2022, vol. 72, issue C

Abstract: SMEs (small and micro enterprises) in developing countries are in general financially depressed; business owners thus resort to other financial instruments (here, personal credit cards) when access to bank loans is prohibited. By investigating two different types of SMEs (namely, informal businesses and formal SMEs) in China, we find that SMEs turn to credit card debt as a substitute when they fail to obtain bank loans. Specifically, we find that households with informal businesses are more likely to use credit cards when their businesses are financially constrained. We also find that when financially constrained, formal SMEs are more likely to carry credit card debt and are also carrying more. This relationship persists after selection issues are addressed. However, credit card debt and bank loans are hardly perfect substitutes as these two instruments may function differently. Consistently, we find that even with bank loans, formal SMEs still carry substantial credit card debt. Additionally, compared to those with no fund need and thus no bank loan, formal SMEs with bank loans are carrying more credit card debt.

Keywords: Credit card debt; Small business finance; Credit constraint; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043951X22000165
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:chieco:v:72:y:2022:i:c:s1043951x22000165

DOI: 10.1016/j.chieco.2022.101758

Access Statistics for this article

China Economic Review is currently edited by B.M. Fleisher, K. X. D. Huang, M.E. Lovely, Y. Wen, X. Zhang and X. Zhu

More articles in China Economic Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().