Do Financial Liberalization Policies Promote Exports? Evidence from China's Panel Data

Abstract

This paper empirically tests whether a country's financial reform promotes expansion of its exports measured by the constant-price total value of exports. We test the hypothesis on dynamic panel data of China. We use system GMM (generalized method of moments) estimation to deal with the potential endogeneity problem of important explanatory variables, including financial deregulation. We find that the estimated coefficient on financial deregulation in both ordinary least squares and system GMM estimation is positive and insignificant at the 5 percent level after controlling for other factors affecting export expansion and for fixed time and province effects.

Keywords:

• dynamic panel data
• exports
• gradual financial deregulation