Research On The Impact Of Digital Financial Inclusion On The Technological Innovation Of Small And Medium-sized Enterprises

The report of the 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China puts forward that we should insist on the core position of innovation in the overall modernization construction of our country.In the context of innovation-driven development strategy,mass entrepreneurship,mass innovation has become a new trend.As the main body of market innovation,small and medium-sized enterprises have the characteristics of large capital demand,high risk and long cycle,because credit is not clear,collateral is insufficient,make it very difficult to obtain the favor of financial institutions.Therefore,small and medium-sized enterprises generally exist“financing difficult,financing expensive,financing slow” problem.The rise of digital technology has created a new platform for the development of digital inclusive finance,which aims to provide comprehensive financial services to groups excluded from traditional finance,to ease the financial predicament of the vulnerable groups and provide financial support for the innovation and development of small and medium-sized enterprises.This article selects 5321 Enterprises of new third board of our country from 2013 to 2020 as the sample,and takes the number of enterprise patent applications as the index to measure the technological innovation of enterprises.The financial development level of digital inclusive finance is measured by the Peking University municipal-level digital inclusive finance index,and the financial constraint is used as the intermediary variable.To construct a two-way fixed-effect model to examine the effect of digital inclusive finance on technological innovation and the impact of its secondary indicators on enterprises’ technological innovation;The mediating effect model is constructed to test the mediating effect of financing constraint.We use R&D Investment and patent application of one-period-delayed enterprises as replacement variables to test robustness,and use internet penetration rate at city level as tool variables to deal with endogeneity.Finally,we test the heterogeneity of sub-samples based on the nature of enterprises and regional institutional environment.The results show that the development of digital inclusive finance can promote technological innovation of small and medium-sized enterprises,and coverage breadth plays the same role in the secondary indicators.Financial constraints play a part of intermediary role in the transmission mechanism to promote technological innovation of small and medium-sized enterprises.Digital inclusive finance has an obvious promotion effect on the independent innovation ability of non-state-owned enterprises,and the innovation promotion effect is better in the good regional institutional environment than in the bad regional institutional environment.Based on the findings of the study,recommendations are made to promote digital inclusive finance to make a breakthrough in easing the financing constraints of small and medium-sized enterprises and promoting enterprise innovation.