Lease-Insurance Synergy: An Empirical Study on Solving the Financing Dilemma of Distant Water Fisheries

Abstract

The global distant water fishery industry has long been trapped in a tripartite financing predicament characterized by “difficult valuation, high operational risk, and mismatched cash flow cycles,” with the penetration rate of traditional credit facilities remaining below 40%. To address this systemic challenge, this study constructs a three-dimensional coupling model of “leasing—insurance—industry,” integrating insurance institutions into the entire chain of vessel valuation, risk hedging, and cash flow alignment. Leveraging panel data from 147 Chinese fishing vessels and 2.795 billion yuan in financing projects spanning 2019–2024, this research conducts the first empirical examination of the causal effects of the lease-insurance linkage mechanism on financing costs and operational performance. The findings demonstrate that this integrated mechanism reduces the comprehensive financing interest rate by 3.2 percentage points, elevates the rent fulfillment rate by 14.3 percentage points, and suppresses the project non-performing rate to below 0.5% (Sun, Y., & Ortiz, J., 2024), with insurance coverage emerging as the most critical driver of risk mitigation. Robustness is confirmed through difference-in-differences (DID) analysis and multiple complementary tests. Further simulation results indicate that applying this framework to the Alaskan fishing fleet in the United States could lower the average financing interest rate from 8.5% to 5.3% and boost the rent fulfillment rate to over 90%. This study proposes that Chinese and American regulatory authorities streamline cross-border filing procedures, establish interoperable data-sharing interfaces, and incorporate fishery leasing into green finance subsidy schemes to facilitate the internationalization of the model. By filling the micro-evidence gap in the coupling of financial instruments for high-risk industries, this paper provides a replicable and scalable financing paradigm for the global distant water fishery sector.