An Empirical Study On The Promotion Of Common Prosperity In Western China By Digital Financial Inclusion

The 20th National Congress of the CPC held in 2022 stressed that “Chinese modernization is the modernization of common prosperity for all the people”.In order to achieve the goal of common prosperity,the Chinese people have made arduous exploration under the leadership of the CPC.Since entering the 21st century,with the improvement of productivity and the improvement of comprehensive national strength,we have been closer to the goal of common prosperity.Fully aware of the changes in the stage of development,the CPC and the state have given greater importance to steadily promoting common prosperity and have set the goal of basically achieving common prosperity by the middle of this century.Compared with Zhejiang Province,a demonstration area of common prosperity,the level of common prosperity in the western region is still low,and it is a“weak link” for the common prosperity of all people.The rapid development of digital inclusive finance,with its characteristics of “inclusive” and “poverty benefit”,has provided a new impetus for the promotion of common prosperity in the western region.Based on the above background,in order to empirically-study the promoting effect of digital inclusive finance on the level of common prosperity in the western region,this paper firstly constructs a whole set of common prosperity index system from the three dimensions of prosperity,development and sharing,and uses the coefficient of variation method to calculate the common prosperity index.Secondly,the panel data of 88prefecture-level cities in western China from 2011 to 2020 are selected,and the fixed-effect model is used to empirically investigate the influence of the development of digital inclusive finance on the common affluence level of prefecture-level cities in western China in recent ten years,and the robustness test is conducted to ensure the robustness of the regression results.Thirdly,the western region is divided into northwest region and southwest region to analyze regional heterogeneity.Finally,in order to study whether the influence of digital financial inclusion on common prosperity is linear,the digital financial inclusion index is taken as the threshold variable and the threshold effect is analyzed through the single threshold effect model.The findings are as follows: First,the common prosperity index shows that the common prosperity level of prefecture-level cities in western China is on the rise during2011-2020,but the difference between cities is still large.Second,digital inclusive finance can positively promote the common prosperity of the western region,and this promoting effect is reflected in three ways: growth effect,development effect and inclusion effect.Third,the promoting effect of digital inclusive financial on common prosperity is heterogeneous in the western region,which is shown as that the northwest region is higher than the southwest region,and the less developed region is higher than the more developed region.Fourth,there is a threshold effect between digital inclusive finance and common prosperity in the western region,and with the improvement of digital inclusive finance level,this effect will become stronger after crossing the threshold value.