A Study On The Impact Of Digital Inclusive Finance On The Performance Of Unlisted Micro And Small Enterprises

Compared with SMEs listed on the SME Board,GEM Board and the New Third Board,non-listed micro and small enterprises are more numerous,have a greater capacity to absorb employment and contribute more to China’s economic development,but they face more severe financing constraints,which force them to reduce some investment activities and limit their profitability.Digital inclusive finance has many advantages and has been shown to have a positive effect on the survival and development of listed SMEs,but to find out whether digital inclusive finance can truly "benefit" SMEs,it is necessary to study smaller and more representative non-listed micro and small enterprises,especially their business performance.More importantly,it is important to study through which channels digital financial inclusion affects the business performance of enterprises,and how the effect differs across regions and institutional environments,in order to better promote the development of unlisted micro and small enterprises.First,this paper systematically reviews the literature related to digital inclusive finance,business performance and the role of digital inclusive finance on micro and small enterprises,proposes the research focus of this paper based on the research results and shortcomings of related literature,and combines transaction cost theory,information asymmetry theory,long-tail theory and financial exclusion theory,and takes the three ways of corporate financing constraints,financial literacy of business owners and technological innovation of enterprises As an entry point,this paper investigates the mechanism of digital inclusive finance affecting the business performance of unlisted micro and small enterprises and puts forward the hypotheses of this paper.Second,this paper takes 3,713 non-listed micro and small enterprises in the newly released 2019 China Household Finance Survey Report Business and Industry Database as the research objects,measures the business performance with return on assets(ROA),and measures the development level of digital inclusive finance in each region with a more micro-level digital inclusive finance index at district and county levels,and explores the impact of digital inclusive finance on business performance from the overall and different regions,different institutional environments,and different business owners’ education and other The impact of digital inclusive finance on business.The main conclusions obtained from the empirical analysis of this paper are as follows: First,the development of digital inclusive finance can help improve the business performance of micro and small enterprises,and its segmentation index coverage breadth,usage depth,and digitization can significantly improve the business performance of enterprises.Second,digital inclusive finance can improve the business performance of micro and small enterprises by alleviating the financing constraints of enterprises and improving the financial literacy of business owners,but it cannot improve the business performance by enhancing the level of technological innovation of enterprises.Third,compared with the business performance of low-educated business owners,the development of digital inclusive finance has a greater effect on improving the business performance of high-educated business owners.Fourth,compared with urban micro and small enterprises,digital inclusive financial development has a stronger effect on the business performance of rural micro and small enterprises,reflecting its proper meaning of "inclusive".Fifth,digital inclusive financial development can significantly improve the performance of eastern and central MSMEs,but not western MSMEs.Sixth,the improvement of micro and small enterprises’ business performance by digital inclusive financial development is stronger in regions with good institutional environment.There are three main innovations in this paper: first,the research object is more representative.At present,the vast majority of the literature on micro and small enterprises is focused on the large scale listed micro and small enterprises,and there are few studies on the more numerous and smaller non-listed micro and small enterprises.In this paper,we take non-listed MSMEs as the research object to study whether digital inclusive finance can significantly affect the performance of non-listed MSMEs,which is more in line with the connotation of "inclusive" and the conclusions are more meaningful.Second,the research perspective is more micro.Most of the existing empirical studies on digital inclusive finance focus on its impact on macroeconomic aspects such as high-quality development,inclusive growth,and poverty reduction,and there are relatively few empirical studies on micro enterprises,while the few studies on the impact of digital inclusive finance on micro and small enterprises also focus on two perspectives,namely,financing constraints and enterprise technology innovation,with few studies from other perspectives.This paper takes enterprise business performance as a new research perspective and thoroughly investigates the impact of digital inclusive finance on enterprise business performance,which to a certain extent enriches the research on digital inclusive finance at the enterprise level.Third,this paper not only examines the direct impact of digital inclusive finance on micro and small enterprises,but also further explores the mechanism of digital inclusive finance affecting business performance from three channels: corporate financing constraints,financial literacy of business owners,and technological innovation of enterprises,while few scholars have studied financial literacy of business owners as a mediating variable in their studies on enterprises.Meanwhile,considering that the performance of unlisted micro and small enterprises with small average asset size may be related to the level of education of business owners,this paper divides the enterprises into two groups according to the level of education of business owners and conducts heterogeneity analysis,while few existing papers consider such heterogeneity at the enterprise level.