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| Commercial Interest Rates in China from the 17th to the early 20th Century: A Study Based on the Evolution of Financial Organizations |
| PENG Kaixiang, CHEN Zhiwu, YUAN Weipeng
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School of Economics and Management, Wuhan University;
Business School, University of Hong Kong;
School of Humanities, Shanghai Jiao Tong University |
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Abstract Due to a lack of systematic commercial interest rate data, reasearches about the economic history of the Ming and Qing dynasties mainly draws conclusions based on the descriptions of interest rates in non-commercial private lending. The data problems lead some scholars to believe that higher interest rates hinder economic development and lead to “a great divergence” between China and the West, while others believe that although there is an interest rate difference between China and the West, Smithian growth suggests that non-market channels such as kinship relationships are still sufficient to support China's development. To solve the data problem, we establish a database of interest rate history since the 17th century, drawn from a combination of commercial documents including letters, account books, bank records, and more general material including contracts, judicial records, diaries, notes, and investigation reports.
To construct meaningful interest rate series from these various sources, we first identify the evolution of financial organizations from the middle and late Ming dynasty to the late Qing dynasty. We reveal that during this period, pawn shops, silver money shops, exchange shops, and an interbank lending market appeared one after another, and successively became the hubs of commercial financing in each stage. Although traditional financial institutions have lost out in their competition with modern financial institutions such as banks, this does not mean that previous developments should be ignored. Before the 20th century, the evolution of traditional financial organizations and the changes in their business and technology were not without breakthroughs, which provided the conditions for the development of modern finance. These activities were closely related to the large-scale, long-distance capital flows of the period, and the market at the time was close to the capital markets examined in the literature, or close to the “highest level” market defined by Fernand Braudel.
Based on this understanding of financial organizations in the Ming and Qing dynasties, we distinguish commercial interest rates from those of non-commercial private lending, and also distinguish the interest rates of ordinary commercial lending from prime commercial lending. Thus, our study reveals that the interest rate showed a general decline in terms of the private lending rate in the late Ming dynasty, particular for commercial lending, which also demonstrated obvious convergence. Although ordinary non-commercial lending interest rates changed little after the late Ming dynasty, the downward trend in commercial interest rates continued into the 19th century, and the lower part (or prime rates) of these rates fell to a greater degree. We also compare interest rates in the “highest level” markets in China and the West, as their business was similar. By the mid-19th century, China's prime rates had fallen to nearly 5% in its advanced regions, although they remained slightly higher than the bill discount rate in London during the same period but were lower or did not exceed similar interest rates for U.S. and Japanese banks.
Regional data also show that interest rates for both ordinary and prime lending tended toward integration in the pre/mid-19th century, while the coastal and hinterland “scissors gap” began in the late 19th century. However, the interest rate difference between traditional financial institutions in commercial ports in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was still smaller than that of banks, and close to the regional interest rate difference between U.S. banks when distance is considered. The primary mechanism for promoting the integration of interest rates between commercial ports is through the local interest rate markets formed by the centralized clearing operations of financial institutions. The standardized interest rate formed in these markets plays the role of a price signal, guiding the cross-regional flow of capital and improving the degree of integration of financial markets. The performance of traditional financial institutions is more controversial in terms of enlarging the scale of capital than in terms of their achievements in market organization, particularly compared with modern banks. However, we find no positive relationship between lending scale and interest rate in commercial lending, so the limited size of traditional financial institutions is more likely to be the result of the limited capital demand in the pre-industrial era.
In summary, our study demonstrates the evolution of financial organizations in China between the 17th and early 20th centuries, which led to the continuous decline of commercial interest rates and an improvement in interest rate integration. Unlike the typical understanding in the literature, we find that it is not personal arrangements such as kinship networks, but impersonal although informal institutions such as the interest rate market and the periodic clearing system that play a key role. This increases our understanding of Smithian growth and its institutional basis during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Moreover, the interest rate market and other institutions still played a positive role after the rise of banks, which reveals the continuity between the development of traditional and modern finance.
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Received: 18 August 2022
Published: 02 July 2023
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