论文部分内容阅读
At the end of 2009, the Greek sov- ereign debt crisis broke out. Then, with the “help” of the three major rating agencies – Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s and Flinch, the debt crisis spread further and further in Europe. Though the European Union (EU) and IMF promised to throw 750 billion euros to save the countries tortured by severe debt problems, the effect remains tiny.
In July 2010 and March 2011, Moody’s dropped the sovereign credit ratings of Portugal and Spain. On September 19, 2011, Standard and Poor’s dropped the long-term sovereign debt rating of Italy from A+ to A and then turned the outlook into negative, causing a sudden tense in the economic situation of Italy, the third largest economy in Europe. This intensified the concerns about whether the European debt crisis could be further spread and knock the whole Euro Zone down.
When the situation in Europe gets worse, the Chinese government, media, enterprises and scholars are attaching great importance to the European debt crisis and always keep alert over the influence it will bring to China. Presently, there are two views about European debt crisis’ influence for China. One view sounds optimistic, saying that the impact will be tiny because the financial service and stock market of China are lowly open and China has limited trade with the European countries that have trouble. The other one is comparatively pessimistic – the European debt crisis will cause shrinking foreign demand and the depreciation of euro, which will affect China’s export, stimulate the flow of“hot money” and then impact the stability of China’s macroeconomic situation. When the crisis initially happened, the first opinion prevailed; however, as the debt crisis deteriorates, more and more people are inclined to believe it will affect China sooner or later. In experts’ opinions, the European debt crisis cannot bring too much direct impact to China but the indirect impact will be obvious. The European debt crisis will affect China’s economy through trade, finance and non-contact conduction.
Influence from Trade
The trade is the most common method of European debt crisis to affect China’s economy. In details, the European debt crisis can cause financial retrenchment, consumption shrinking, depreciation of euro and rise of trade protectionism, which can be the major factors for China’s foreign trade. Firstly, in order to deal with the sovereign debt crisis, many European countries took tight financial policies to repress the economic growth while shrinking the consumption of residents. Europe is the biggest market for China’s exported commodities. The decrease of demand in Europe can directly affect the stability and increase of China’s export. According to the report on September 23, several exhibitors that attended the 8th China International Expo for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises said that the orders from Europe kept decreasing in these years, showing that the crisis has already applied negative influence over the commodities exported from China to Europe and the foreign trade-oriented enterprises. Wei Jianguo, former Minister of Commerce, pointed out that the European debt crisis’s influence over China’s foreign trade will come up in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012.
The impact is also reflected from data. According to the latest data from the European statistic department, the Sino-European trade volume in July 2011 continued to fall compared with a month before. The year-on-year decrease was 0.8%. In that month, the exports volume from Europe to China increased by 12.3%, higher than the 4.1% average growth of European total export. In comparison, the imports volume of Europe from China decreased by 6.2%. In fact, in the first half of 2009 when the European debt crisis just showed itself, the exports volume from China to Europe had a general decrease –the exports volume from China to 15 major Eu- ropean countries dropped by 13.0% year on year. Among them, the exports volume from China to Spain had a drastic decrease of 36.1%.
Secondly, the investors elude high-risk assets, leading to the continuous depreciation of euros and thus indirectly increasing the exchange rate of RMB against euros. Under this condition, the price of China’s exported commodities is increased and their competitive power in the European market decreases. Meanwhile, it will bring great risks of exchange settlement to the Chinese enterprises that use the euro as the settlement currency. From the beginning of 2010, the exchange rate of the euro against RMB kept decreasing and by now it has depreciated by 15%, causing significant negative influence over the Chinese companies specializing in exporting commodities to Europe. It is reported that the growth of Sino-European trade volume went slower and slower from the second quarter of 2010. In the first eight months of 2011, the year-on-year growth rate of the exports volume from China to Europe increased by only 18.5%, lower than the average growth rate of 23.9% from 2003. In August 2011, the exports volume from China to Europe had no increase from last August and compared with the data in July it dropped by 2.6%. Actually, the average monthon-month growth rate reached 5% from 2000.
In addition, because many enterprises have to wait for a long while from getting orders to receiving payments, the depreciation of euro greatly increased the risk of exchange settlement for Chinese companies, especially these labor-intensive enterprises. The 15% deprecation means the loss of 1.5 million yuan for a one-million-euro order. A report from China Times told an exemplary case: a Dongguan, Guangdong-based signed a contract valuing 500 thousand euros with a European company. The company was supposed to deliver the product within three months. At the time when the contract was signed, 500 thousand euros equaled 4.89 million yuan. However, when the products were delivered, the 500 thousand euros only valued 4.25 million yuan. The loss for the Chinese companies caused by exchange rate fluctuation reaches 600 thousand yuan, which was too much for these kinds of companies without high profit margin and big profit space. In that situation, these companies exporting commodities to European countries had to face the predicament in which receiving orders was accompanied with loss while not receiving orders meant the stop of production. They were forced to change their price, delay or even delete their orders. This not only damages the enterprise’s reputation, but also leads to the loss of customers and orders, which will further affect the survival and development of enterprises.
Thirdly, the aggravation of European debt crisis results in the depression of local economy and boosts the trade protectionism in that area. According to the statistical data from the Ministry of Commerce, the EU launched 11 investigations into the commodities from China, 1.6 times as many as in 2009 and the largest number in four years. Previously, India and the U.S.A were active in launching anti-dumping investigations into the commodities from China while the EU was mild towards the Chinese commodities. It is apparent that the EU has to reduce the degree of trade freedom. In this August, most EU members agreed with EU Council’s act about imposing 69.2% anti-dumping tax over the tiles from China and the act took effect in September. Such a powerful anti-dumping policy marks the rise of trade protectionism in Europe. The tariff barrier brought by the anti-dumping policies of the EU severely impaired the Chinese companies’ advantages and caused the obstructed export.
In addition, the EU uses the high standard as the trade barrier more frequently than ever before. In November 2010, the EU reported 159 items of non-food consumption goods that might be dangerous for human beings and 71 of them came from China. This report greatly affected the fame of Chinese commodities in China. After the issuance of the report, the toys from China had a drastic decrease in the sale in Europe.
Influence from Finance
The European debt crisis can affect China’s economy through financial methods. In details, the European debt crisis can influence the Chinese economy with three factors:
Firstly, the European debt crisis causes the potential sovereign debt default, shrinkage of list companies’ assets and depreciation of euros, which may cause the depreciation of the euro- based assets China holds. Fortunately, according to the report from Xinhua News Agency, China held no sovereign debts of Greece and 4% of the Italian sovereign debts. Therefore the loss is expected to be small. Meanwhile, the commercial banks in China held quite a small amount of euro-based assets and many of them were loans. The risk can be neglected. The most worrying factor is that a large proportion of the huge amount of foreign exchange reserves China hold smight depreciate along with the depreciation of euros.
Secondly, the short-term capital flow will generate the possibility that “hot money” might flow into China under the influence of European debt crisis as well as the loose monetary policy the EU takes. This will aggravate the pressure of imported inflation and the appreciation of RMB for China. The uncertainty of the European economic outlook forces a large amount of capital, which is avoiding risk and pursuing value, to get into the comparatively safer Chinese market. The large amount of capital flows into China in a short while, raising China’s concerns about the damages of “hot money”.
According to the data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchanges, the surplus of financial projects in China in the first quarter of 2011 was 84.7 billion U.S. dollars, up 40.9% from one year before. In the fourth quarter, the surplus climbed to 117.7 billion U.S. dollars. It proved that the net inflow of international capital in China is going through a drastic increase. The inflow of “hot money” may impair the Chinese government’s control over the inflation. On the other hand, it will increase the stress for the appreciation of RMB. In consideration of the damages of inflation and the influence of RMB appreciation to the Chinese foreign trade, the inflow of “hot money” could be called the biggest problem that the European debt crisis brought to China.
Thirdly, for China, the European debt crisis can reduce the amount of direct investment from Europe to China. According to the statistical data from the Ministry of Commerce, in 2010, the 27 countries of EU totally set up 1688 new enterprises in China and the actual amount of capital reached 6.589 billion U.S. dollars. The EU is third largest investor in China. Among these European countries, Greek invested 85.56 million U.S. dollars in China by March 2010 and Spain invested 2.016 billion U.S. dollars through 2010. Though these countries’ investment in China only took a small proportion of the total amount of foreign capital China actually uses, that doesn’t mean the European debt has little or tiny influence over the foreign direct investment into China – since the EU is an important source of overseas investment in the world. Its attitudes towards Chinese market may change the minds of other investors and thus have some negative influence over the general situation of China’s recruitment of foreign investment.
Influence from Non-contact Conduction
Apart from the financial and trade methods, the European debt crisis can also affect the Chinese economy through non-contact conduction. This means that the investors’ confidence might be influenced by the European debt crisis. It even generates the “herd behavior”, i.e. the individual investor’s decisions might be influenced by the group and follow the mass activity when he/she has no complete information.
For example, the data published by Germany-based research institute Sentix on August 8 showed that investors’ confidence in 17 countries of the Euro Zone dropped from 5.3 in July to -13.5 in August, which was the biggest fall ever since. A major reason of the drop was the European debt crisis. Meanwhile, the Chinese investors’ confidence also had a drastic decrease. According to the statistical data, the Investor’s Confidence Index in China was 42.82 in August, down 8.27% compared with the figure in June. In addition, 28.82% investors held pessimistic opinions towards the Chinese economic development in the next six months as shown in a survey in September. It is obvious that the European debt crisis and the other negative factors in the global economy had already affected Chinese investors’ confidence.
In addition, when the debt crisis is threatening Europe, the issuance and circulation of China’s government bonds are also influenced. From July, the urban investment bonds, which are issued by local governments of China, gradually received cold treatment. Many investors undersold their city investment bonds in the secondtier market. On July 27, the short-term financing bonds valuing 20 billion yuan issued by the Ministry of Railway failed to find any bidders, which was unprecedented in the past. Though a lot of factors should be blamed for the problems in the bonds issuance, the influence from the European debt crisis cannot be denied.
The Ways to Deal with It
In order to handle the spreading European debt crisis, the Chinese government and enterprises can take several methods to minimize the effect from this crisis over China’s economy. For the government, it can further enlarge the scope of the cross-border RMB trade settlement to optimize the enterprises’ exchange rate risk management, save the cost of exchange settlement and trade. Various departments should work together to enhance the management of foreign exchange trade and further improve the regulation and control the stock market, the property market and the inflow of “hot money”. The investment into education, medical care and social insurance should be increased and the domestic demand should be enlarged to reduce the country’s dependence on the foreign demand. In addition, the local government’s abilities of budging and risk management should be enhanced to prevent their debts and financial risks growing too big.
For enterprises, they should try to use U.S. dollars and RMB as the settlement tool for their foreign trade and get the payments as quickly as possible. In addition, they can use the export credit insurance to protect themselves from risks. They also need to develop bigger overseas market by dividing some of their focus from developed European and American markets to ASEAN, Latin America and other emerging markets. They should improve the technological contents and safety standards of their products through active research and development as well as effortful innovations. They should participate in overseas acquisitions and restructurings to avoid the trade barrier with direct investment.
In July 2010 and March 2011, Moody’s dropped the sovereign credit ratings of Portugal and Spain. On September 19, 2011, Standard and Poor’s dropped the long-term sovereign debt rating of Italy from A+ to A and then turned the outlook into negative, causing a sudden tense in the economic situation of Italy, the third largest economy in Europe. This intensified the concerns about whether the European debt crisis could be further spread and knock the whole Euro Zone down.
When the situation in Europe gets worse, the Chinese government, media, enterprises and scholars are attaching great importance to the European debt crisis and always keep alert over the influence it will bring to China. Presently, there are two views about European debt crisis’ influence for China. One view sounds optimistic, saying that the impact will be tiny because the financial service and stock market of China are lowly open and China has limited trade with the European countries that have trouble. The other one is comparatively pessimistic – the European debt crisis will cause shrinking foreign demand and the depreciation of euro, which will affect China’s export, stimulate the flow of“hot money” and then impact the stability of China’s macroeconomic situation. When the crisis initially happened, the first opinion prevailed; however, as the debt crisis deteriorates, more and more people are inclined to believe it will affect China sooner or later. In experts’ opinions, the European debt crisis cannot bring too much direct impact to China but the indirect impact will be obvious. The European debt crisis will affect China’s economy through trade, finance and non-contact conduction.
Influence from Trade
The trade is the most common method of European debt crisis to affect China’s economy. In details, the European debt crisis can cause financial retrenchment, consumption shrinking, depreciation of euro and rise of trade protectionism, which can be the major factors for China’s foreign trade. Firstly, in order to deal with the sovereign debt crisis, many European countries took tight financial policies to repress the economic growth while shrinking the consumption of residents. Europe is the biggest market for China’s exported commodities. The decrease of demand in Europe can directly affect the stability and increase of China’s export. According to the report on September 23, several exhibitors that attended the 8th China International Expo for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises said that the orders from Europe kept decreasing in these years, showing that the crisis has already applied negative influence over the commodities exported from China to Europe and the foreign trade-oriented enterprises. Wei Jianguo, former Minister of Commerce, pointed out that the European debt crisis’s influence over China’s foreign trade will come up in the fourth quarter of 2011 and the first quarter of 2012.
The impact is also reflected from data. According to the latest data from the European statistic department, the Sino-European trade volume in July 2011 continued to fall compared with a month before. The year-on-year decrease was 0.8%. In that month, the exports volume from Europe to China increased by 12.3%, higher than the 4.1% average growth of European total export. In comparison, the imports volume of Europe from China decreased by 6.2%. In fact, in the first half of 2009 when the European debt crisis just showed itself, the exports volume from China to Europe had a general decrease –the exports volume from China to 15 major Eu- ropean countries dropped by 13.0% year on year. Among them, the exports volume from China to Spain had a drastic decrease of 36.1%.
Secondly, the investors elude high-risk assets, leading to the continuous depreciation of euros and thus indirectly increasing the exchange rate of RMB against euros. Under this condition, the price of China’s exported commodities is increased and their competitive power in the European market decreases. Meanwhile, it will bring great risks of exchange settlement to the Chinese enterprises that use the euro as the settlement currency. From the beginning of 2010, the exchange rate of the euro against RMB kept decreasing and by now it has depreciated by 15%, causing significant negative influence over the Chinese companies specializing in exporting commodities to Europe. It is reported that the growth of Sino-European trade volume went slower and slower from the second quarter of 2010. In the first eight months of 2011, the year-on-year growth rate of the exports volume from China to Europe increased by only 18.5%, lower than the average growth rate of 23.9% from 2003. In August 2011, the exports volume from China to Europe had no increase from last August and compared with the data in July it dropped by 2.6%. Actually, the average monthon-month growth rate reached 5% from 2000.
In addition, because many enterprises have to wait for a long while from getting orders to receiving payments, the depreciation of euro greatly increased the risk of exchange settlement for Chinese companies, especially these labor-intensive enterprises. The 15% deprecation means the loss of 1.5 million yuan for a one-million-euro order. A report from China Times told an exemplary case: a Dongguan, Guangdong-based signed a contract valuing 500 thousand euros with a European company. The company was supposed to deliver the product within three months. At the time when the contract was signed, 500 thousand euros equaled 4.89 million yuan. However, when the products were delivered, the 500 thousand euros only valued 4.25 million yuan. The loss for the Chinese companies caused by exchange rate fluctuation reaches 600 thousand yuan, which was too much for these kinds of companies without high profit margin and big profit space. In that situation, these companies exporting commodities to European countries had to face the predicament in which receiving orders was accompanied with loss while not receiving orders meant the stop of production. They were forced to change their price, delay or even delete their orders. This not only damages the enterprise’s reputation, but also leads to the loss of customers and orders, which will further affect the survival and development of enterprises.
Thirdly, the aggravation of European debt crisis results in the depression of local economy and boosts the trade protectionism in that area. According to the statistical data from the Ministry of Commerce, the EU launched 11 investigations into the commodities from China, 1.6 times as many as in 2009 and the largest number in four years. Previously, India and the U.S.A were active in launching anti-dumping investigations into the commodities from China while the EU was mild towards the Chinese commodities. It is apparent that the EU has to reduce the degree of trade freedom. In this August, most EU members agreed with EU Council’s act about imposing 69.2% anti-dumping tax over the tiles from China and the act took effect in September. Such a powerful anti-dumping policy marks the rise of trade protectionism in Europe. The tariff barrier brought by the anti-dumping policies of the EU severely impaired the Chinese companies’ advantages and caused the obstructed export.
In addition, the EU uses the high standard as the trade barrier more frequently than ever before. In November 2010, the EU reported 159 items of non-food consumption goods that might be dangerous for human beings and 71 of them came from China. This report greatly affected the fame of Chinese commodities in China. After the issuance of the report, the toys from China had a drastic decrease in the sale in Europe.
Influence from Finance
The European debt crisis can affect China’s economy through financial methods. In details, the European debt crisis can influence the Chinese economy with three factors:
Firstly, the European debt crisis causes the potential sovereign debt default, shrinkage of list companies’ assets and depreciation of euros, which may cause the depreciation of the euro- based assets China holds. Fortunately, according to the report from Xinhua News Agency, China held no sovereign debts of Greece and 4% of the Italian sovereign debts. Therefore the loss is expected to be small. Meanwhile, the commercial banks in China held quite a small amount of euro-based assets and many of them were loans. The risk can be neglected. The most worrying factor is that a large proportion of the huge amount of foreign exchange reserves China hold smight depreciate along with the depreciation of euros.
Secondly, the short-term capital flow will generate the possibility that “hot money” might flow into China under the influence of European debt crisis as well as the loose monetary policy the EU takes. This will aggravate the pressure of imported inflation and the appreciation of RMB for China. The uncertainty of the European economic outlook forces a large amount of capital, which is avoiding risk and pursuing value, to get into the comparatively safer Chinese market. The large amount of capital flows into China in a short while, raising China’s concerns about the damages of “hot money”.
According to the data from the State Administration of Foreign Exchanges, the surplus of financial projects in China in the first quarter of 2011 was 84.7 billion U.S. dollars, up 40.9% from one year before. In the fourth quarter, the surplus climbed to 117.7 billion U.S. dollars. It proved that the net inflow of international capital in China is going through a drastic increase. The inflow of “hot money” may impair the Chinese government’s control over the inflation. On the other hand, it will increase the stress for the appreciation of RMB. In consideration of the damages of inflation and the influence of RMB appreciation to the Chinese foreign trade, the inflow of “hot money” could be called the biggest problem that the European debt crisis brought to China.
Thirdly, for China, the European debt crisis can reduce the amount of direct investment from Europe to China. According to the statistical data from the Ministry of Commerce, in 2010, the 27 countries of EU totally set up 1688 new enterprises in China and the actual amount of capital reached 6.589 billion U.S. dollars. The EU is third largest investor in China. Among these European countries, Greek invested 85.56 million U.S. dollars in China by March 2010 and Spain invested 2.016 billion U.S. dollars through 2010. Though these countries’ investment in China only took a small proportion of the total amount of foreign capital China actually uses, that doesn’t mean the European debt has little or tiny influence over the foreign direct investment into China – since the EU is an important source of overseas investment in the world. Its attitudes towards Chinese market may change the minds of other investors and thus have some negative influence over the general situation of China’s recruitment of foreign investment.
Influence from Non-contact Conduction
Apart from the financial and trade methods, the European debt crisis can also affect the Chinese economy through non-contact conduction. This means that the investors’ confidence might be influenced by the European debt crisis. It even generates the “herd behavior”, i.e. the individual investor’s decisions might be influenced by the group and follow the mass activity when he/she has no complete information.
For example, the data published by Germany-based research institute Sentix on August 8 showed that investors’ confidence in 17 countries of the Euro Zone dropped from 5.3 in July to -13.5 in August, which was the biggest fall ever since. A major reason of the drop was the European debt crisis. Meanwhile, the Chinese investors’ confidence also had a drastic decrease. According to the statistical data, the Investor’s Confidence Index in China was 42.82 in August, down 8.27% compared with the figure in June. In addition, 28.82% investors held pessimistic opinions towards the Chinese economic development in the next six months as shown in a survey in September. It is obvious that the European debt crisis and the other negative factors in the global economy had already affected Chinese investors’ confidence.
In addition, when the debt crisis is threatening Europe, the issuance and circulation of China’s government bonds are also influenced. From July, the urban investment bonds, which are issued by local governments of China, gradually received cold treatment. Many investors undersold their city investment bonds in the secondtier market. On July 27, the short-term financing bonds valuing 20 billion yuan issued by the Ministry of Railway failed to find any bidders, which was unprecedented in the past. Though a lot of factors should be blamed for the problems in the bonds issuance, the influence from the European debt crisis cannot be denied.
The Ways to Deal with It
In order to handle the spreading European debt crisis, the Chinese government and enterprises can take several methods to minimize the effect from this crisis over China’s economy. For the government, it can further enlarge the scope of the cross-border RMB trade settlement to optimize the enterprises’ exchange rate risk management, save the cost of exchange settlement and trade. Various departments should work together to enhance the management of foreign exchange trade and further improve the regulation and control the stock market, the property market and the inflow of “hot money”. The investment into education, medical care and social insurance should be increased and the domestic demand should be enlarged to reduce the country’s dependence on the foreign demand. In addition, the local government’s abilities of budging and risk management should be enhanced to prevent their debts and financial risks growing too big.
For enterprises, they should try to use U.S. dollars and RMB as the settlement tool for their foreign trade and get the payments as quickly as possible. In addition, they can use the export credit insurance to protect themselves from risks. They also need to develop bigger overseas market by dividing some of their focus from developed European and American markets to ASEAN, Latin America and other emerging markets. They should improve the technological contents and safety standards of their products through active research and development as well as effortful innovations. They should participate in overseas acquisitions and restructurings to avoid the trade barrier with direct investment.