The Impact Of Digital Financial Inclusion On The Development Of The Real Economy

Digital financial inclusion is an important trend in recent research,and the integration of digitalization and inclusive finance is a new development opportunity for China in the "100-year great change",and it is the proper meaning of the new development pattern.General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out in the report of the 20 th National Congress that it is necessary to attach importance to the supporting role of financial institutions in the fields of rural areas,poverty alleviation,and small and micro enterprises,strengthen guidance,continuously expand the coverage of financial services,and continue to improve satisfaction and availability.As an important real economic sector in China,small and micro enterprises and rural areas are also long-tail customers of the financial market,and the biggest problem affecting their development is insufficient financial availability.The lack of financial services in the real sector further hinders the sustained and healthy development of the real economy,and at the same time causes the rapid accumulation of systemic risks.With the help of digital technologies such as the Internet,big data,and artificial intelligence,digital inclusive finance can help improve the financial availability of long-tail customers,maximize their long-tail effects,and generate huge economic value.This is bound to curb the trend of increasingly dematerializing the economy from real to virtual,promote the transformation and upgrading of the traditional financing pattern,and add impetus to China’s modernization.In conclusion,studying the correlation mechanism between digital inclusive finance,long-tail customer financial availability and the real economy has certain positive significance for the theoretical and practical development of digital inclusive financial policy.This paper uses panel data from 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2020,and empirically studies the impact of digital financial inclusion on the development of China’s real economy by using bidirectional fixed-effect model,systematic GMM estimation method and panel quantile regression.Firstly,the positive effect of digital financial inclusion on the real economy under static conditions is verified by establishing a fixed-effect model,and the systematic GMM estimation method is used to test whether the result is still valid considering the dynamic influence of sequence correlation,and panel quantile regression is used to exclude the influence of extreme values to observe whether the effect is still significant.Secondly,from the perspective of financial availability of long-tail customers,the intermediary effect model of financial availability of small and micro enterprises and rural areas is established to dynamically test the impact of financial availability of long-tail customers on the development of the real economy,and reveal the promotion process of digital inclusive finance on the real economy.Finally,the financial structure index is constructed,and the promotion effect of digital financial inclusion on the real economy is analyzed from the perspective of the heterogeneity of the development degree of regional financial markets.The results show that: first,digital inclusive finance has a significant role in promoting the development of China’s real economy,and stable research conclusions can be obtained under both dynamic system GMM estimation and static two-way fixed-effect model.Second,the financial availability of long-tail customers such as small and micro enterprises and rural areas has an intermediary effect in the impact of digital inclusive finance on the real economy.At the same time,the "epidemic-affected" year samples were excluded from the robustness test to prove the robustness of the results.Compared with the regression results of the sample in the year without excluding the impact of the epidemic,it is further found that there are obvious differences in the risk tolerance and survival strategies of small and micro enterprises and rural areas under the impact of the epidemic.Third,the impact of digital financial inclusion on the real economy is heterogeneous in terms of financial availability and is related to the financial structure.