Institute of Finance and Economics Research, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Dec 16;16(12):e0261214. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261214. eCollection 2021.
As digital finance is widely spread and applied in China, this new format of financial technology could become a new way to reduce poverty in rural areas. By matching digital financial indexes of the prefectural-level cities with microdata on rural households from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) in 2017, we find that digital finance significantly suppresses absolute poverty and relative poverty among rural households in China, which is supported by a series of robustness tests, such as the instrumental variable approach, using alternative specifications, and excluding extreme observations. Additionally, we provide evidence that the poverty reduction effect of digital finance is likely to be explained by alleviating credit constraints and information constraints, broadening social networks, and promoting entrepreneurship. Our findings further complement the research field on financial poverty reduction and offer insights for the development of public financial policies of poverty reduction in other countries, especially in some developing countries.
随着数字金融在中国的广泛传播和应用，这种新的金融科技形式可能成为农村减贫的一种新途径。通过将地级市的数字金融指标与 2017 年中国家庭金融调查（CHFS）的农村家庭微观数据相匹配，我们发现数字金融显著抑制了中国农村家庭的绝对贫困和相对贫困，这一系列稳健性检验也支持了这一发现，如工具变量法、使用替代规格和排除极端观测值。此外，我们提供的证据表明，数字金融的减贫效应可能是通过缓解信贷约束和信息约束、扩大社会网络和促进创业来实现的。我们的研究结果进一步补充了金融扶贫领域的研究，并为其他国家，特别是一些发展中国家制定公共扶贫政策提供了启示。
