Does digital finance promote entrepreneurship of migrant? Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

We investigate the effects of digital finance on migrants’ entrepreneurship using the merged data of Digital Financial Inclusion Index and China Migrants Dynamic Survey. Our findings reveal that digital finance could help migrant to get rid of low-income survival-oriented entrepreneurship, and has no effect on entrepreneur-oriented entrepreneurship. We then interpret these results from two aspects. First, the digital finance has created a better business environment, which enables migrant to obtain more employment opportunities. Second, the low human capital of migrant suppresses the entrepreneur-oriented entrepreneurship.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital finance
• entrepreneurship
• employment
• migrant

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D12
• E44
• G21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Youth Scholar Team in Social Sciences of Wuhan University ‘New Perspective for Development Economics Research’ [2020]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [2020]; National Natural Science Foundation of China [71661137003,71773084].