Abstract

This paper studies financing channels in Chinese small and medium sized shipping companies and factors for the recent shipping market recession since 2008. Our data is based on a survey of opinions of more than one hundred top and middle level managers from shipping companies in Ningbo, which share typical characteristics of small and medium sized shipping companies in China. We develop two new influential scoring methods to analysing the data. The robustness test for our research findings are conducted by comparing the results from two methods