The Role of Long-term Loans for Economic Development: Empirical Evidence in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether long-term funds had a positive impact on investment in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. When there exists a possibility of a liquidity shortage, the firm's investment decision tends to be conservative. Thus, to the extent that the long-term debt makes the liquidity shortage less likely outcome, long-tern loans can have a positive impact on investment. In the first part of this paper, we estimate Tobin's Q type investment functions of Japanese firms for two different sample periods. In 1972-84, we find that the long-term loan ratio had an additional positive effect on investment. However, in 1985-96, we cannot find that a higher ratio of long-term loans increased the Japanese firm's investment. The result indicates that the size of long-term loans had a great influence on the firm's investment only at the early stage of the financial market development in Japan. In the second part of this paper, we estimate investment functions of Korean and Taiwanese firms in the late 1990s. In the late 1990s, Korea experienced a serious crisis, while the decline of Taiwanese economy was relatively moderate. We, however, find that the long-term debt ratio had a significantly positive impact on the investment in both countries. The result indicates that long-term funds might have mitigated the decline of investment regardless of the magnitude of the crisis.

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