Short-Term Pain but Long-Term Gain: Urban Financial Digitization and Rural Migrants’ Living Quality in China

Wei Wang, Gai Luo, Xinzhi Gong () and Yifan Lv
Additional contact information
Wei Wang: Guangxi Carbon Management and Green Development Research Institute, School of Business, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Gai Luo: School of Business, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Xinzhi Gong: College of Tourism & Landscape Architecture, Guilin University of Technology, Guilin 541004, China
Yifan Lv: School of Business, Guilin University of Electronic Technology, Guilin 541004, China

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 17, 1-21

Abstract: China’s urbanization has witnessed a significant influx of people pursuing better economic prospects. However, as digitization becomes increasingly integrated into urban living, it raises the bar for migrants’ digital literacy, and creates adaptation challenges for rural migrants. Despite a few pieces of literature having analyzed how micro-level economic and social characteristics of rural migrants affect their urban living quality in inflow areas, few studies have examined the influencing factors of migrants’ urban living quality from the perspective of digitization level of the inflow areas, which is a nonnegligible environmental factors in modern China. Based on the data of China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CMDS), this paper empirically examines how urban financial digitization in inflows affects rural migrants’ urban living quality. The impact of financial digitalization on urban living quality of rural migrants presents a significantly positive “U” shape. That is, with the improvement of financial digitalization, rural migrants’ urban living quality in inflow areas would first decline and then increase. The mechanism study shows that the financial digitization affects rural migrants’ living quality through urban settlement intention as intermediary variable. Furthermore, heterogeneity across education attainment, migration scope and duration were investigated. The results of the study provide empirical evidence on how to make rural migrants obtain better life experience with the development of urban digitization.

Keywords: living quality; urban financial digitization; rural migrants (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/17/8086/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/17/17/8086/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:17:y:2025:i:17:p:8086-:d:1745015

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().