Does Digital Inclusive Finance Reduce The Urban-rural Income Gap?

Historically,the income gap between urban and rural areas is an important reason for the inequality of China's overall income distribution.At present,China is in an important stage of steady progress in urbanization.A large number of rural population is gathering in cities,and the urban scale is expanding continuously.The flow of rural labor force has an important impact on its own income and has shaped the income pattern of urban and rural residents in the new era.Compared with traditional finance,digital inclusive finance has more advantages in accelerating the circulation of production factors and optimizing the allocation of resources,and is an important factor affecting the urban-rural income gap.In addition,as China's economic development enters the new normal period,economic growth slows down and social instability factors increase,the urban-rural income gap becomes particularly prominent.Therefore,it is particularly important to investigate the relationship between digital inclusive finance and urban-rural income gap in the new normal period.Starting from this realistic background,this paper studies how digital inclusive finance influences the urban-rural income gap from the perspective of the digital inclusive finance that influences the urban-rural income gap,and provides corresponding policy Suggestions on how to improve the urban-rural income gap and how to develop digital inclusive finance in China and other regions in the new era.This paper takes the impact of digital inclusive finance on the urban-rural income gap as the research topic,and also studies the impact of the coverage breadth,use depth and digital support services of financial services on the urban-rural income gap,and conducts an empirical analysis using the sample data of 283 cities at prefecture level and above in China.This paper first sorts out the research background,research significance and relevant literature of the topic,then summarizes the impact of digital inclusive finance on the urban-rural income gap from the theoretical basis and puts forward three corresponding research hypotheses,and then makes an overall evaluation of China's digital inclusive finance in the research.In the fourth part of this paper,empirical analysis is started.Firstly,the model is constructed,sample data and variable selection are explained,and the corresponding descriptive statistics are given.Then,empirical analysis is conducted on the panel data of 283 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2011 to 2015.Firstly,this paper introduces the quadratic term of digital inclusive finance into the model,and conducts a regression analysis from the sample data of the whole country and the eastern and western regions.It finds that the relationship between digital inclusive finance and urban-rural income gap presents a u-shaped curve in the samples of the whole country and the cities of the central and western regions.Then,the quadratic term of digital inclusive finance is removed from the model,and regression analysis is carried out from the sample data of the whole country and the eastern and western regions.It is found that the eastern,central and western cities are in different stages of u-shaped curve for the city interior.Finally,further study found that the use of financial services significantly reduced the urban-rural income gap in the whole country and in the eastern,central and western cities,while the impact of coverage breadth and digital support services on the urban-rural income gap varied from city to city.In addition,to ensure the robustness of estimated results,the first approach in this paper is to replace the current term of digital inclusive finance and other control variables with their respective lagged term for regression,the second method is to remove the data of Beijing,Tianjin,Shanghai and Chongqing,and then remove the relevant data of 30 provincial capitals for regression.Finally,it summarizes the research conclusions of this paper and sublimates the conclusions into corresponding policy Suggestions.It is considered that one of the measures to improve the macro income distribution pattern is to reduce the urban-rural income gap by developing digital inclusive finance.At the same time,in view of the deficiencies in this paper,this paper also gives prospects for further research.