The study examines the impact of Government-Backed Financing Guarantee (GFG) programs on employment in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) using data from the Zhejiang Guarantee Group and non-listed SMEs in China. The findings demonstrate that these programs have a significant positive effect on employment in SMEs, particularly in private firms, and non-ZhuanJingTeXin firms. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that GFGs can enhance firm employment rates by mitigating financing constraints. It also contributing to firm revenue growth.

Using administrative universal business registration data as well as primary offline and online surveys of small businesses (including unregistered self-employments) in China, we examine (i) whether digitization helps small and medium enterprises (SMEs) better cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and (ii) whether the pandemic has spurred digital technology adoption. We document significant economic benefits of digitization in increasing SMEs' resilience against such a large shock, as seen through mitigated demand decline, sustainable cash flow, ability to quickly reopen, and positive outlook for growth. Post the January 2020 lockdown, firm entries exhibited a V-shaped pattern, with entries of e-commerce firms experiencing a less pronounced immediate drop and a quicker rebound. Moreover, the pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of existing firms and the industry in multiple dimensions (e.g., altering operation scope to include e-commerce, allowing remote work, and adopting electronic information systems). The effect persists more than one year after reopening, and is more pronounced for certain sectors, firms in industrial clusters, and areas with more digital inclusion but less financial efficiency, constituting initial evidence for the long-term impact of the pandemic and the supposedly transitory mitigation policies.

Banking competition may enhance or hinder the financing of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Using a survey on the financing of China’s SMEs combined with detailed bank branch information, we investigate how concentration in the local banking market affects the availability of credit. It is found that lower market concentration alleviates financing constraints. The un-concentrated presence of joint stock banks has a larger effect on alleviating credit constraints, while the presence of state-owned banks has a smaller effect, than the presence of city commercial banks.

This article examines the liquidity-investment relation of Chinese SMEs in comparison to large firms, and specifically focuses on the exogenous IPO event to observe how the responses of firm investment to cash flow change subsequent to the IPO. We find that the sensitivity of fixed investment to cash flow varies with firm size, and the over-reliance on internal funds by SMEs has reduced more prominently after the IPO than their larger counterparts, providing new evidence that liquidity constraints of investment are not constant in the same firm but shift along the life cycle. Our results strongly suggest that other financial resources to cover the cash flow shortfalls resulting from timing differences between the operating and investment cycles need to be considered in the examined relation and previous studies may have underestimated the impact of liquidity constraints on firm investment.

There are many factors that affect SMEs’ ability to borrow from bank. Based on facts and data about SMEs’ financing in Chengdu city, capital of Southwestern China’s Sichuan province, this paper is intended to investigate the factors affecting SMEs to borrow from bank by methods of empirical study. We find that whether SMEs can provide collateral or guarantee is a decisive factor, factors such as firm size, willingness to accept bank’s clauses, close relationship with bank play an important role. But in contrast to intuition, correlation analysis and regression result shows that SMEs’ financial variables such as income, net profit, asset-debt ratio and credit score is not obvious to affect their ability to get bank loan. Consistent with theory prediction and qualitative analysis, firm size is the most important factor to affect SMEs’ ability to borrow from bank. The regression results reflect information asymmetry between SMEs and banks, and that banks had taken a simple way to protect themselves.