EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Digital financial inclusion, industrial structure and urban–Rural income disparity: Evidence from Zhejiang Province, China

Changcun Wen, Yiping Xiao and Bao Hu

PLOS ONE, 2024, vol. 19, issue 6, 1-24

Abstract: Rising income inequality challenges economic and social stability in developing countries. For China, the fastest-growing global digital economy, it could be an effective tool to promote inclusive development, narrowing urban–rural income disparity. It investigates the role of digital financial inclusion (DFI) in narrowing the urban–rural income gap. The study uses panel data from 52 counties in Zhejiang Province, China, from 2014 to 2020. The results show that the development of DFI significantly reduces rural–urban and rural income inequality. The development of DFI helps optimize industrial structure and upgrade the internal structure of agriculture, facilitating income growth for people in rural areas. Such effects are greater in poorer counties. Our findings provide insights into why rapid DFI and the narrowing of the rural–urban income disparity exist in China. Moreover, our results provide clear policy implications on how to reduce the disparity. The most compelling suggestion is that promoting the optimization of industrial structure through DFI is crucial for narrowing the urban–rural income gap.

Date: 2024
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0303666 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 03666&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:pone00:0303666

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0303666

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-31
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0303666