An Empirical Analysis Of The Impact Of China's Inclusive Financial Development On Urban-rural Income Gap

In the past 40 years of reform and opening up,the “growth miracle” of the Chinese economy has brought about a continuous increase in national income,and it has inevitably led to a widening income gap among residents,especially the income distribution gap between urban and rural residents.The report of the 19 th National Congress pointed out that inadequate development imbalance is the main difficulty and challenge of China's economic development.Therefore,how to narrow the income gap between urban and rural areas and achieve coordinated and unified development has become the key to building a well-off society in an all-round way.Inclusive finance is intended to meet the financial services needs of all sectors,especially low-income and vulnerable groups.It is of great significance to break the dual structure of China's urban and rural areas,coordinate regional economic development,and narrow the income gap between urban and rural areas.At the Third Plenary Session of the 18 th Central Committee in 2013,China also proposed to develop inclusive finance to reduce poverty.In this context,it is of great practical significance to study inclusive finance from both theoretical and empirical aspects and to explore its relationship with the urban-rural income gap.From a theoretical perspective,this paper draws on the theoretical research on financial development and income gap between domestic and foreign scholars,and draws three paths that influx financial impact on urban-rural income gap: lowering threshold effect and non-equilibrium effects and enlarging the effects of poverty reduction.In this paper,the inclusive financial index and the Theil index are used to measure the inclusive financial level and the urban-rural income gap respectively.The static panel model is used to analyze the provincial panel data of the national,eastern,central and western regions in 2006-2017.The results show that inclusive finance has significantly reduced the urban-rural income gap at all levels,and the western region has the best reduction effect,exceeding the national average.This shows that the development of inclusive finance has achieved good results in China,and it has positive significance for the reduction of urban-rural income gap.