Measurement Of The Level Of Rural Financial Services And Its Determinants In Hubei Province

It is the important objective for the reform of rural financial services in China to improve the level of financial services and achieve the full coverage of it in rural areas. In recent years, the studies regarding the rural financial services in developing countries were conducted from some macro level perspective, in which the measuring methods of financial services and its determinants were preliminarily explored, and provided certain meaningful implications for nation’s macro-financial policy making. However, a unified method to measure the level of financial services reasonably still appears to be a gap in existing researches, thus the studies were hardly pushed further and the resulting suggestions on related policy were rarely operational and well-directed.Based on the lately theory of financial development, this paper constructs the index system for the measurement of rural financial services, and applies it to the actual evaluation in the case of Hubei Province including64counties or cities, analyzes the factors which influence the level of rural services in Hubei. The main content and conclusions are as follows:Construct index system for evaluating the financial services. Chapter2generalizes the indicators and methods of measuring the financial services from previous researches, proposes measurement index on Level of Rural Financial Services (LRFS) based on IFI index, and establishes four dimensions. Compared with others, these index covers more comprehensive dimensions of services and are more operational in study.Conduct the evaluation of the level of rural financial services in Hubei Province.(See Chapter3)In order to obtain the schema of rural financial services in Hubei, this paper simply analyzes the outlets of the financial service institutions and its loans in Hubei, and conducts a measurement of rural financial services in64counties(or cities) during2006-2010in Hubei according to the dimensions and method addressed in Chapter2. The results show:from the horizontal, the LRFS in Hubei was comparatively low, and only Enshi City appeared at high level in2010; from the vertical, the LRFS had no significant improvement for5years from2006to2010; in addition, there is evident gap on the LRFS among different counties (or cities) in Hubei.Analyze the factors which influence the LRFS in Hubei Province. Chapter4proposes the hypothesis based on existing studies regarding the determinants of LRFS, and employs the panel data for64counties (or cities) to conduct the empirical test. The results suggest: Level of regional economic development, employment, medical care, and informatization and urbanization rate have the significant positive impact on the LRFS. This implies:in order to improve the LRFS in Hubei, the infrastructure for rural financial services require being strengthened, the credit services could be enhanced further, the service costs expect to be reduced and the new technology of rural financial services should be extensively spread, ect..