| In recent years,the environment and conditions for China’s economic development have undergone tremendous changes.Consumption plays a fundamental role in expanding domestic market demand and promoting economic and social development,and expanding domestic demand,especially consumer demand,is of great significance to China at this stage in promoting high-quality development and creating a higher quality of life for residents.China’s consumption potential has not yet been fully released due to many factors such as the level of regional economic development,consumption patterns and concepts,and consumption scenarios.Based on the application of digital information technology,digital inclusive finance provides diversified,low-cost and sustainable financial products and services for all social strata,making consumer payments more convenient and efficient while also making credit and investment and financial services more convenient,and has become an important direction and a reliable way to unleash the demand potential of the whole society.In this regard,in the new era,to improve the institutional mechanism of consumption,raise the willingness and level of consumption,it is also necessary to combine it with digital inclusive finance.As a major economic province,Guangdong Province is at the forefront of reform and development in the country.In the face of a century of change,the development of digital inclusive finance offers a new way to restore domestic demand,transform consumption and recover the economy.Against this backdrop,the study of the impact of digital inclusive finance on Guangdong Province’s consumer spending and its intrinsic linkages is of great theoretical and practical significance for Guangdong Province to optimise its institutional mechanisms,develop digital inclusive finance,promote the growth of consumer spending and facilitate the upgrading of consumer spending,as well as provide forward-looking research and analysis for other provincial regions and urban agglomerations across China.Based on a study of the domestic and international literature,the study was conducted on the impact of the development of digital inclusive finance on residents’ consumption in Guangdong Province.Firstly,it summarises and composes the relevant literature on digital inclusive finance and residents’ consumption,and puts forward the innovation points and shortcomings;based on the theory of digital inclusive finance and consumption,it analyses the mechanism of digital inclusive finance affecting residents’ consumption in Guangdong Province,analyses the current situation of digital inclusive finance and residents’ consumption in Guangdong Province,and puts forward the research hypothesis.On this basis,annual relevant economic panel data of twenty-one prefecture-level cities in Guangdong Province from 2011 to 2020 and the Peking University 2022 China Digital Inclusive Finance Index are selected to construct a two-way fixed-effects model by controlling several control variables development on resident consumption expenditure in Guangdong Province as a whole and in different dimensions,while the instrumental variable method is used to test the endogeneity In order to ensure the robustness of the study results,a variety of methods were used to test the robustness of the empirical results.The study shows that: firstly,there is a significant positive impact of digital inclusive finance development on Guangdong Province’s residential consumption,with the breadth of coverage significantly contributing to Guangdong Province’s residential consumption in different dimensions.Secondly,there is regional and urban-rural heterogeneity in the impact of digital inclusive finance development on resident consumption in Guangdong Province.From a regional perspective,the development of digital inclusive finance significantly boosts the consumption of residents in non-PRD regions of Guangdong Province,while the boosting effect on the PRD region does not show significance.From an urban-rural perspective,there is a significant positive boosting effect of digital inclusive finance development on the consumption expenditure of residents in both urban and rural areas of Guangdong Province,and further analysing the differences between urban and rural areas of Guangdong Province,the development of digital inclusive finance on the The promotion effect of digital inclusive finance development on residents’ consumption in non-PRD cities in Guangdong Province is the most significant.Thirdly,the development of digital inclusive finance in Guangdong Province has boosted the subsistence consumption of PRD residents as well as the three levels of basic consumption expenditure of non-PRD residents,and promoted the upgrading of the consumption structure of non-PRD residents.Fourthly,digital credit,digital payment,digital finance and digital insurance in Guangdong Province are all effective ways in which the development of digital inclusive finance has impacted residents’ consumption,with digital credit having the greatest level of impact and alleviating liquidity constraints being particularly critical to boosting residents’ consumption in Guangdong Province.Finally,in conjunction with the findings of the study,four targeted policy recommendations are proposed : strengthen the construction of information infrastructure,promote innovation in digital inclusive financial products and services in the Greater Bay Area,increase the popularization of digital inclusive finance knowledge in the province,and optimise local digital inclusive financial regulatory and governance mechanisms. |
