17至20世纪初中国的商业利率变迁:以金融组织演进为线索的考察  

Commercial Interest Rates in China from the 17th to the early 20th Century:A Study Based on the Evolution of Financial Organizations

作　　者：彭凯翔 陈志武[2] 袁为鹏 PENG Kaixiang;CHEN Zhiwu;YUAN Weipeng(School of Economics and Management,Wuhan University;Business School,University of Hong Kong;School of Humanities,Shanghai Jiao Tong University)

机构地区：[1]武汉大学经济与管理学院,湖北武汉430072 [2]香港大学经管学院,中国香港999077 [3]上海交通大学人文学院,上海200240

出　　处：《金融研究》2023年第6期187-206,共20页Journal of Financial Research

基　　金：国家社会科学基金的资助(21&ZD078、20&ZD065)。

摘　　要：传统中国商业利率的水平在文献中时有讨论,但实证上却较为模糊。本文基于综合各种史料的利率数据库及对金融组织层级的认识,估测了17世纪至20世纪初的商业利率变化趋势,表明它长期趋于下降,尤其是最惠级利率的下降更为明显;至19世纪中期,最惠商业利率在多地已下降至接近年利5%的水平,虽略高于同期英格兰的银行利率,但并未超过美国和日本银行的利率。本文也表明,利率的变迁与金融组织的演进息息相关,利率市场等一定程度上非正式但也非人格化的组织与制度发挥了重要作用,它们把资金市场中能够更高效匹配的部分不断区分出来。这一机制直到银行兴起后仍发挥重要作用。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 unde

关 键 词：利率史 大分流 金融组织 

分 类 号：N25[自然科学总论] G10[文化科学] G20