Digital Inclusive Finance,entrepreneurship And Income Gap Between Urban And Rural Areas

High-quality economic development is the primary task of comprehensively building a strong socialist modem state,focusing on the dialectical unity of equity and efficiency,pursuing both the continuous growth of economic aggregates and emphasizing the sharing of the fruits of development.In recent years,the total economic volume of China has been climbing higher and higher,and the economic strength has achieved a historic leap,but the Gini coefficient is still in a large range,and the problem of urban-rural income disparity has become a prominent contradiction in the current stage of economic development,as well as a major obstacle to the comprehensive construction of a strong socialist modern country and the common prosperity.Therefore,to guarantee the high-quality economic development,we need to build a reasonable income distribution pattern and narrow the urban-rural income gap.Based on the imbalance of financial resource allocation and the wide gap between the rich and the poor,the United Nations has proposed the concept of inclusive finance,aiming to provide financial services to the disadvantaged groups at an affordable cost and provide a feasible way to narrow the urban-rural income gap.However,the development of inclusive finance by traditional financial institutions is too costly and contrary to the profit-seeking nature of financial institutions,making the development of inclusive finance slow.With the rise of digital economy,the application of digital technology to inclusive finance can better utilize the advantages of domestic Internet popularity and big data,break through the bottleneck of traditional finance,optimize the allocation of financial resources,play the role of financial poverty reduction,and help narrow the urban-rural income gap.Based on the issue of the relationship between digital inclusive finance and the impact of urban-rural income gap,we comb through relevant literature and books,describe the development lineage and current situation of digital inclusive finance and urban-rural income gap,introduce the relevant index evaluation system,and initially use data for descriptive analysis.Based on the theories of financial exclusion effect,threshold effect and poverty reduction effect,we sort out and summarize the characteristics of digital inclusive finance with wide coverage,low cost and strong risk control,further analyze the direct and indirect mechanisms of digital inclusive finance to suppress the urban-rural income gap by combining theory and practice,and put forward the corresponding hypotheses.In the empirical test,the 2011-2019 Beihang University Digital Inclusive Finance Index,urban panel data and industrial and commercial enterprise registration information data are matched,and digital inclusive finance is selected as the core explanatory variable,urban-rural income gap as the explanatory variable,SME entrepreneurship as the mediating variable,and economic development level,industrial structure and urbanization rate as the control variables,and a fixed-effects model is used to test the digital inclusive finance The inhibitory effect of digital inclusive finance on the urban-rural income gap is tested using a fixed-effects model.Considering the heterogeneous differences in regions and development dimensions,the subindices of digital inclusive finance(breadth of coverage,depth of use,and degree of digitization)are used to regress the urban-rural income gap,and the overall sample is divided into eastern,central,and western regions for sub-sample regression.To avoid endogeneity issues such as two-way causality from affecting the reliability of the estimation results,a double difference model,instrumental variables,and first-order lagged terms are used to ensure the robustness of the results.The following conclusions are drawn:first,the development of digital inclusive finance can significantly reduce the urban-rural income gap,and the negative effect of digital inclusive finance on the urban-rural income gap is greater in the eastern cities than in the central and western regions,and the conclusion still holds by introducing robustness tests such as instrumental variables.Second,regressions on the urban-rural income gap are done using the sub-index of digital inclusive finance,and the estimation results show that the increase in coverage has a significant negative effect on the urban-rural income gap,while the sub-index of digitization and depth of use do not have a significant effect on the urban-rural income gap.Third,digital inclusive finance has a positive effect on SME entrepreneurship,and promoting residents’ entrepreneurship is an important mechanism for digital inclusive finance to suppress the urban-rural income gap.Further study finds that digital inclusive finance reduces the urban-rural income gap mainly by promoting rural residents’ entrepreneurship and micro and small enterprises’ entrepreneurship.Based on the above findings,this paper puts forward relevant policy recommendations and provides an outlook for the subsequent research work.