1、 外文翻译 Chinas Reform of Rural Credit Cooperatives Material Source: The Chinese Economy Author: YUK-SHING CHENG Since rural reforms were launched in 1978, the Chinese government has been searching for a new financial system that can facilitate the development of the rural economy. Several factors have
2、 rendered financial development in rural areas necessary. The market-oriented reforms have freed rural households from the control of the peoples commune. Being independent producers, they need credits from financial institutions for agricultural activities. The expansion of nonagricultural activiti
3、es, typically organized by township and village enterprises, also fueled the demand for loans in rural areas. Further more, without the pooling of production risks of the collective, some peasant households also need to borrow against the future when adverse shocks occur. However, establishing a rur
4、al financial system that is suitable for China is a complicated task. There are hundreds of millions of rural households and millions of small and medium-sized enterprises scattered in large rural areas with poor transportation and communication infrastructure. Moreover, these rural households and e
5、nterprises only demand a small amount of loans. High unit costs will be incurred by any institution that supplies credits to them. Without government intervention, the rural financial market would only encourage the survival of usury, as in many other developing countries. The Chinese government has
6、 actively intervened in this market from the very beginning of the reforms. It has attempted to build up a rural financial system with rural credit cooperatives (RCCs) as grassroots units. Although the RCCs are cooperatives in name, they have worked more like branches of state banks in practice. The
7、 problem facing the Chinese government has been how to administer and supervise this large and geographically dispersed system. Various experiments to reform the RCCs were carried out in the past two decades. However, the Chinese government apparently has not found a solution to all the problems in
8、the system. Reform Experiments in 20032004 After years of discussion, new reform initiatives were seen in June 2003.The Chinese government designated eight provincial units (Jilin, Shandong, Zhejiang, Guizhou, Jiangxi, Shaanxi ,Chongqing, and Jiangsu) as the first batch of experimental regions for t
9、he reform of RCCs. A policy document called “Plan for Deepening the Reform of Rural Credit Cooperatives” (hereafter the Plan) was issued to explain in detail the measures to be implemented. In November 2004, the reforms were extended to another twenty-one provinces. Among the provincial-level admini
10、strative units, only Xizang and Hainan were excluded from the reform. There was no RCC in the former, while the problems in the RCCs in the latter were so serious that the central government decided to deal with it separately. Despite the wide adoption of the reforms, the Chinese government continue
11、d to call them experiments, indicating the possibility that the reforms could be modified in light of the realized impact of the initial changes. In the new reform program, it was reiterated that the general goal of the reforms was to transform the RCCs into local or community financial institutions
12、 that would serve the needs of farmers, agriculture, and the rural economy. Comprehensive measures were designed to tackle the major problems of the RCCs. The program mainly consists of three elements. At the micro level, the aim is to build up a governance structure with a new operation mechanism.
13、The ownership of the RCCs would be clarified by establishing legal entities at appropriate administrative levels. The new approach opens up a variety of ownership forms which do not necessarily preserve the cooperative nature of the RCCs. There is no need for different regions to adopt a unified mod
14、el of reform. Another important element is the strengthening of the role of the provincial government in administering the RCCs. The provincial governments will also be responsible for choosing the appropriate reform model for the RCCs in their jurisdiction. The third element was to inject funding i
15、nto the RCCs to help them shed the financial burdens that had been built up in the past. If the RCCs are trapped in financial difficulties, it is impossible for them to carry out the ownership reforms. The new strategy of cleaning up the NPLs is very often dubbed “spending money to buy a new mechani
16、sm”. In what follows, we shall discuss the specific measures announced in the Plan. Clarifying the Property Rights The Plan mandates that RCCs should be transformed into legal entities with clear ownership and governance structure. The Plan indicates that a shareholding system should be established
17、wherever possible. Those that do not meet the conditions for establishing the shareholding system should follow the principles of the shareholding system to establish shareholding cooperatives. For regions where cooperatives are to be maintained at the current stage, improvements should still be mad
18、e to the cooperative system. More precisely, in regions where RCCs have a high level of commercialization and capitalization, shareholding banks can be established. In densely populated regions producing cotton and grain, legal person entities should be unified at the county level (originally with R
19、CCs and county-level RCCs as separate legal persons). For other regions, the practice of having different RCCs and county-level RCCs as separate legal entities can be maintained, but the management has to be improved. Enlarging the Role of Provincial Governments According to the Plan, the central go
20、vernment decided to change the administrative structure of the RCCs. After RCCs were detached from the ABCs in 1996, they were administered by the PBOC. However, the PBOC was also responsible for supervising all financial institutions. The first problem is that it did not have the capacity to monito
21、r the activities of the RCCs. The second is the lack of checks and balances when a single institution is responsible for both administrative and supervisory roles. In the Plan, provincial governments are designated to be responsible for the administration of the RCCs. Accordingly, the China Banking
22、Regulatory Commission (CBRC), which was established in March 2003 to take up the role of financial supervision from the central bank, will be responsible for supervising the RCCs. The provincial government can decide in what way the RCCs should be administered. They can set up a provincial union of
23、RCCs or any other organization to take up the job if they find it appropriate. No restrictions are imposed on their choice. However, the responsibility of administering the RCCs should not be further transferred to lower-level governments. Limitations of the Reforms Although the reforms have been im
24、plemented for a short period, some preliminary indicators show that progress has been made in the financial performance of RCCs. However, whether RCCs can perform well in the long run depends largely on how the new system works. Unfortunately, there are some fundamental problems that remained unreso
25、lved in the new wave of reforms. We can first have a look at the improvement in the financial performance of the RCCs. The capital-adequacy ratio, one of most important indicators of financial fragility, increased by 10.94 percentage points within two years to reach 2.49 percent at the end of 2004.
26、Moreover, total profits of RCCs amounted to RMB10.462 billion in 2004, positive for the first time in the past decade. In the first half of 2005, total profits of RMB9.336 billion were registered. These improvements indicated that transitional arrangements to improve the balance sheets of RCCs have
27、worked in an expected way. As explained above, the special central bank bills can be cashed only if the RCCs can raise the capital-adequacy ratio to a satisfactory level. The provincial governments thus have tried their best to accomplish this task. Many regions have tried to achieve the target by i
28、ncreasing the amount of paid-in capital. They have done so mainly by mobilizing, and sometimes forcing, the staff and workers of RCCs to become shareholders. The staff and workers of RCCs were willing to buy the newly issued shares of their RCCs because they knew that the RCCs would be able to get s
29、ome matching funds from the central government, which would help the RCCs to survive. Some workers were not willing to buy the shares, but they eventually had to do so because their RCCs assigned a mandatory purchasing quota for every worker. The farmers bought shares of RCCs because they could obta
30、in credits only if they did so. Consequently, the capital-adequacy ratio rose to 5.45 percent from52.9 percent (Chang 2004b). The improvements in financial performance do not imply that a new and healthy operating mechanism has been established. In fact, the reform program itself has a few limitatio
31、ns. Two major fundamental issues deserve special attention. The first is what role RCCs should perform in rural finance. Under the current policy, the Chinese government emphasizes that RCCs should serve the farmers, agriculture, and the rural economy. This is in fact a policy objective. On the othe
32、r hand, the government wants the RCCs to be financially independent. That requires the RCCs to be run on a commercial basis. The conflict between the two goals is obvious. Wherever nonagricultural lending has a higher return than agricultural lending, which is often the case, the RCCs tend to extend
33、 loans to nonagricultural activities. A shift to a shareholding system would not help. To the extent that the RCCs aim to maximize returns to shareholders, they may tend to provide more nonagricultural loans. The second issue is about the role of the provincial government in the new administrative s
34、ystem. One of the policy intentions is to shift the responsibility for administering the RCCs to the provincial government. The progress in the reforms thus far could not have been made without the involvement of the provincial government. However, the enhanced role of the local government in admini
35、stering the RCCs is also the most important source of risk that the reform could turn sour. The dilemma is that when the provincial government has to bear the responsibility, it would be unlikely to allow the RCCs to be truly autonomous in operation. One worry that has often been raised by Chinese r
36、esearchers is the possibility that RCCs would gradually become the financial arms of local governments, without the ability to refuse the supply of funds to the investment projects supported by local governments. Under such a system, the quality of loans could not be maintained and thus the instabil
37、ity of the system could not be avoided. The behavior of the provincial governments in the reform process seems to justify this worry. Some researchers have already observed that there have been no significant changes in the governance structure of the RCCs in the experimental regions. Rather, the pr
38、ovincial governments have attempted to consolidate decision power to their own hands. The eight provinces designated as the first batch of experimental regions have all chosen to set up an RCCU at the provincial level. In each province, the county-level RCCs are shareholders of the provincial RCCs,
39、but the latter in fact has the power to administer the former. Shen(2004) even warned that the provincial RCCs are now operating on such a large scale that problems of moral hazard could easily arise because they might be “too big to fail”. 中国农村信用社改革 资料来源 : The Chinese Economy 作者： YUK-SHING CHENG 自从
40、 1978 年农村改革 开始 ，中 国 政府一直在寻找一个新的金融 体系来 促进农 村经济发展 。 以市场为导向的改革已经摆脱了人民公社控制农户 。 作为独立的生产者 ，他们 为了 农业活动需要从金融机构贷款 。 而且 由于 非农业活动的扩大 ，出现了大批乡镇企业，这也促进了农村地区的贷款需求 。 此外，一些 农户也需要在未来发生不利 情况 时 进行贷款。 然而 ,建立健全农村金融体系 ,对中国 来说 是一个复杂的任务。有几亿农户和数百万的中小企业分散在没有完善交通和通信设施的农村。此外 ,这些农村家庭和企业只需少量的贷款 ， 高成本 阻碍 了 任何机构向他们提供贷款 。没有政府干预 ,农村金
41、融市场只会鼓励高利贷的生存 ,就 像在其他许多发展中国家。 中 国政府 从一开始的改革就积极介入 ， 试图建立一个 合适的新 金融体系。 在过去的二十年 中， 农村信用社改革进行了各种 试验。 但是，似乎还没有找到解决所有问题 的办法。 2003-2004 年改革 经过多年的讨论，新的 体制 改革 措施 在 2003 年 6 月实行。 （吉林，山东，浙江，贵州，江西，陕西，重庆和江苏） 八 个省和直辖市 作为农村信用社改革试验 的第一批地区 。 国务院 颁布关于 深化 农村信用社改革 试点实施方案的通知（以下简称通知） 详细解释即将实施的措施 。 2004 年 11 月，改革扩大到另外二十个省
42、 。 其中省级行政单位中，只有西藏和海南 没有列入 改 革 名单 。 因为 前者没有农村信用社 ，而后者的农村信用社的问题十分严重，中央政府决定分开处理。 新的改革方案 反复 重申改革的总体目标是 将 农村信用社 转变成 地方或社区金融机构， 符合农户 ， 农业和 农村经济的需要 。 目的是解决农村信用社存在的主要问题 。 该方案主要包括三个要素 ： 一 建立一个新的运行机制和管理结构 ；二 省级政府 应 加强 对 农村信用社 的 管理 ，提出适合本地区农村信用社 的改革模式 ； 三 向 农村信用社注入资金，以帮助他们摆脱过去已 有的 财政负担。接下来，我们将讨论在该 方案 宣布的具体措施 。
43、 明晰产权 该 方案 的任务 是 农村信用社应转变为法律实 体，明确 其 所有权和治理 结构。 尽可能建立股份制 。 在高商业化和资本化 的 地区，农村信用社可以建立股份制银行 。 那些不符合建立股份制 的， 应遵循股份制原则，建立股份制合作社。对于目前 还 维持在合作社阶段 的 地区， 改革 仍应 是 合作制 。 在人口稠密的棉粮生产地区，法人实体应由县 一 级 统一 。 扩大了省级政府的作用 根据该 方案 ，中央政府决定改变农村信用社管理体制 。 农村信用社 1996年从 中国农业银行脱离以后 一直 是由中国人民银行管理 。 但是 ，中国人民银行还负责监管所有金融机构 。 它没有能力来监测
44、农村信用社的活动 ，而且由 单一的机构负责行政和监督缺乏 相互的制约 。 在该 方案 中，省级政府指定为农村信用社 的管理负责 。 省级政府可以决定以什么方式管理的农村信用社 ， 可以成立一个合适 的省信用 联社 或其他组织 。 然而，农村信用社的管理责任不应再转移到下级政府 。 改革的局限 虽然改革实施了很短的时期， 但 一些初步的指标显示，农村信用社在财务状况上 取得了 进展。 不过，农村信用社 能否 在长期运行 中保持 良好很大程度上取决于新 的体制 。 不幸的是，一些根本问题 并没有在 新的改革 中 解决 。 我们可以先看看农村信用社在改善财务 上的 表现 。 资本充足率， 最为 金融
45、脆弱性最重要的指 标之一，两年内增加 10.94 个百分点 ，在 2004 年底达到百分之 2.49。 此外， 2004 年农村信用社利润总额达 10.462 亿元，在过去十年来第一次呈阳性反应 。 在 2005 年上半年，利润总额登 记为 9.336 亿元 。 这些 都 表明，农村信用社的资产负债表 进入 预期的 目标。 专项中央银行票据，只有农村信用社资本充足率达到令人满意的水平 才 可兑现 ，因此 省级政府尽力完成这项任务 ，许多地区都试图通过增加实收资本达到的目标 。 他们主要是通过动员 甚至 强迫农村信用社的工作人员和职工入股 。大部分人 都愿意买农村信用社新发行的股份因为他们知道，
46、农村 信用社将可以得到一些中央政府 的 配套资金，这将有助于农村信用社生存 。而 有些人 并 不愿意买股票，但他们最终不得不这样做，因为他们的农村信用社为每个 职工 强制分配购买配额 。 财务绩效的改善并不意味着一个新的健康的运行机制已经建立 。 事实上，改革方案本身所具有的一些限制 。 两个主要的基本问题值得特别注意 。 首先是农村信用社在农村金融 中 应执行什么样的作用 。 根据现行政策， 一方面 政府强调农村信用社要 服务于三农 。另 一方面，政府 又 希望农村信用社在财政 上 独立 ，这就要求农村信用社要在商业基础上运行 。 两个目标之间的冲突是显而易见的 。村信用社 要在商业基础上运
47、行 。 两个目标之间的冲突是显而易见的 。 无论 什么情况下 非农贷款比农业贷款更高的回报， 这 也就 是为什么 农村信用社 趋向 发放非农贷款 。体制的 转变 并不能解决问题 。 在某种程度上，农村信用社的目标是最大限度地回报股东，他们可能更倾向于提供非农贷款。 第二个问题是关于省 级 政府 在 新的 管理体系中 的 角色 。 政策的目的之一是把农村信用社的管理 责任转变为 省级政府的责任 。 到目前为止在改革上 取得 的进展离不开省级政府的参与 。 然而，地方政府 加强对农村信用社的管理 也是风险 来源之一。 当前的 困境是，省级政府要承担责任， 就 不可能允许农村信 用社真正独立运作 。 中国学者经常提出一个担心，农村信用社的可能逐渐成为地方政府的金融武器， 而必须向 地方政府 支持 的项目提供资金 。 这种 情况 下，贷款质量无法维持下去，因此该 体系 的不稳定性是无法避免的 。
