Social Capital,Digital Financil Inclusion And The Income Gap

China’s economic development has made world-renowned achievements,gradually emerging from its past state of poverty and backwardness,creating a great deal of wealth and a significant increase in the efficiency of social and economic operations.The achievements in economic construction have also brought about a number of socio-economic problems.With the continuous increase in social wealth,social equity issues such as income distribution and income disparity in China have gradually become apparent.How to narrow the income gap and alleviate social equity has become one of the important issues facing China at present.Social capital is not only an informal contract to maintain the functioning of society and coordinate conflicts of interest,but also an alternative mechanism for information sharing and resource allocation,which often interferes with the distribution of social resources.As a result,social capital has become another important factor affecting people’s income and income disparity,after physical and human capital.In addition,with the improvement and popularity of Internet technology,Internet finance,cloud computing and big data are widely used,and digital inclusive finance has become one of the areas of academic concern.Due to the low threshold characteristics of digital inclusive finance itself,some people who have long been excluded from finance can enjoy financial services,and the fairness and inclusiveness of finance have been effectively enhanced.To a certain extent,digital inclusive finance can alleviate the widening or even narrowing of the income gap,which has a positive impact on enhancing the rationality and balance of income distribution.Starting from the prefectural and municipal levels,this paper uses the China Household Tracking Survey(CFPS)data from 2014-2018 for empirical analysis and verifies the impact of social capital on household income and income disparity by means of panel quantile regression.It is found that social capital positively affects household income and that social capital has a more pronounced positive contribution to higher income households,with the higher the household income the more pronounced the contribution of social capital to income,and thus to income disparity.The results of the sub-sample regressions,divided by urban and rural areas,show that social capital has a more pronounced income boosting effect on high-income households in urban areas,i.e.the impact of social capital on household income disparity is greater in urban areas.Based on this,the paper introduces digital inclusive finance as a moderating variable and adds the interaction term between social capital and digital inclusive finance to the model,confirming that digital inclusive finance can give full play to its moderating role and alleviate the widening of the income gap.Finally,combining the full analysis and the final conclusion,this paper offers specific policy advice on the development of income disparity and digital inclusive finance.