【正文】
r the informal financial sector leads to growth in China, helping to shed light on the difference in results between Allen et al. (2020) and Ayyagari et al. (2020). Clearly distinguishing nonbank financial institutions from banks in our study has several other merits. First, we add to previous studies employing macro data often consider only banks, as they dominate the Chinese financial sector. Nonbank financial institutions such as rural and urban credit cooperatives, trust and investment panies, and financial panies have been installed as reactions to developments in the formal banking system (see . Laurenceson and Chai (2020), and Kumar et al. (1997)). Second, while cross country differences, such as political and cultural variations as well as heterogeneity in accounting standards, make it difficult to directly pare Chinese banks with their international counterparts, China’s nonbank financial institutions can serve as a more appropriate ―reference group‖. For identifying the causality between finance and growth, it will be ideal if the difference between banks and nonbank financial institutions only lies in the reforms they have received. Therefore, under the assumption that better reforms lead to greater efficiency, the testable hypothesis will be that the financial development of institutions having benefited more from reforms exhibits greater correlation with growth. Noheless, banks and nonbank financial institutions are also different in some other aspects. For instance, while banks have received much earlier and more profound financial reforms but have granted loans mostly to large and medium sized firms in China, nonbank financial institutions have seldom benefited from reforms but have mainly extended their loans to small or private firms. Such differences, however, are working in favor of identifying the causality between finance and 4 growth. Empirically bank development being more correlated with economic growth than the development of nonbank financial sector may indicate the importance of the link between financial reforms and financial development and thus economic growth. Otherwise financial development may simply react to the real sector, given the fact that small and private firms are the engine of China’s Growth. In China, most nonbank financial institutions only operate within a province. While banks, especially stateowned banks, have their nationallevel headquarters, crossprovince bank lending seldom happens due to the restriction imposed by the central bank of China. Therefore it is safe for us to pare the performance of those two types of financial institutions at provincial level. Financial development of those financial institutions in each province is measured, in a conventional way, by the ratios of local savings and loans to GDP. The panel dataset we employ covers the period 1995–2020, right after the mid1990s financial reforms took place. Choosing such a period also helps us alleviating the reverse impact from growth to financial reforms. For instance, the con