By Zhuo Xian, Department of Development Strategy and Regional Economy, DRC

Research Report, No.1, 2018 (Total 5276) 2018-1-3

Abstract: Over last decade, the development of China’s financial sector has outpaced that of the overall economic growth and the financial value in GDP has taken up the lion’s share of major industries. In the past ten years, two thirds of the value of service industry are attributed to the development of financial and real estate industries, showing a rare picture known as financial inflation. The development between financial sector and aggregate economy presents an inverted U trajectory and when the proportion of financial sector in GDP exceeds a certain level, the contribution of financial sector will become weak or even negative. If financial inflation breaks away from the real economy, it will impede the resource allocation in industry with high-efficiency, retard the process of “creative destruction”, leading to the crowding-out effect to human capital in real economy and reducing the potential of the labor productivity of the whole society. The main reason is that the mix of financial liberalization and government guarantee has intensified the negative externality of finance, making the scale of real financial activities surpass the optimal limit of the society. Therefore, the transformation of real economy requires the optimization of financial development rather than the maximization of its scale, and one of the most important policy guidelines is to ease and internalize the negative externality of financial sector and make the market participants share corresponding risk costs.

Key words: economic transformation, financial inflation, negative externality