Poverty reduction in rural China: Does the digital finance matter?
Boou Chen and
Chunkai Zhao
PLOS ONE, 2021, vol. 16, issue 12, 1-27
Abstract:
As digital finance is widely spread and applied in China, this new format of financial technology could become a new way to reduce poverty in rural areas. By matching digital financial indexes of the prefectural-level cities with microdata on rural households from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) in 2017, we find that digital finance significantly suppresses absolute poverty and relative poverty among rural households in China, which is supported by a series of robustness tests, such as the instrumental variable approach, using alternative specifications, and excluding extreme observations. Additionally, we provide evidence that the poverty reduction effect of digital finance is likely to be explained by alleviating credit constraints and information constraints, broadening social networks, and promoting entrepreneurship. Our findings further complement the research field on financial poverty reduction and offer insights for the development of public financial policies of poverty reduction in other countries, especially in some developing countries.
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)
Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261214 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 61214&type=printable (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0261214
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0261214
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone (plosone@plos.org).