Can Digital Financial Inclusion (DFI) effectively alleviate residents’ poverty by increasing household entrepreneurship? – an empirical study based on the China Household Finance Survey（CHFS）

ABSTRACT

Based on data from CHFS, this paper explores the mitigating effect of DFI development to enhance household entrepreneurship on residents’ income growth and asset poverty, and analyses whether there is significant diversity in the degree of impact between different regions and groups through a heterogeneity study. The study finds that DFI has a significant effect on poverty alleviation. In the mechanism analysis, the effect of DFI on income poverty and asset poverty alleviation through promoting household entrepreneurship is 2.97% and 9.27% respectively. In the heterogeneity, the development of DFI has a significant contribution to the alleviation of income poverty of rural residents and the alleviation of asset poverty of urban residents; among similar regions, the poverty effect alleviation effect is more pronounced for the group with higher education level. This paper enriches the research related to the promotion of entrepreneurship and thus poverty alleviation by DFI, and provides a theoretical basis and empirical reference for how to alleviate poverty by financial instruments.

KEYWORDS:

• DFI
• poverty alleviation
• household entrepreneurship
• CHFS

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• G18
• D10
• J24

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ News source: http://news.cctv.com/2020/08/23/ARTIAW7X8f2ltRDsofPURdCr200823.shtml?spm=C94212.P4YnMod9m2uD.ENPMkWvfnaiV.585..

² The Peking University Digital Financial Inclusion Index has released two issues, 2011–2015 and 2016–2018.

³ The low-education group includes those with junior high school education and below, and the high-education group includes those with high school education and above.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China [20BJL144]; the Qinglan Project of Jiangsu Province [2021]; the 2021 Postgraduate Research and Innovation Project of Guangdong University of Foreign Studies [21GWCXXM-025]; International Training Program for Outstanding Young Scientific Research Talents.