数字基础设施建设与金融包容性发展:中国经验

Digital Infrastructure Construction and Financial Inclusion:Evidence from China

发展包容性金融是促进共同富裕的重要手段。“十三五”期间,中国向农村地区实施了大规模“电信普遍服务工程”。该工程为约13万个行政村接入4G基站和光纤。本文将手工收集该期间约13万个数字基础设施建设行政村试点名单数据与中国家庭金融调查微观数据进行匹配,形成“行政村-家庭”微观大样本数据集。基于这一精细地理尺度和家庭数据,本文借助大规模准自然实验,利用双重差分法研究农村数字基础设施建设对家庭金融包容的影响。研究发现,“十三五”期间农村偏远地区数字基础设施建设显著推动了农村金融包容性发展,这一结果在一系列稳健性检验下依然成立。机制分析结果表明,农村数字基础设施建设显著改善了家庭信息获取环境、提高了家庭金融知识水平以及促进了家庭数字金融使用。异质性分析表明,在受教育水平越低、人均收入越少以及距离最近银行网点越远的家庭,农村数字基础设施建设对家庭参与正规金融市场的影响越大。本文研究表明,农村偏远地区数字基础设施建设缓解了金融资源分配不均,有助于增加低收入家庭和弱势群体获得正规金融服务的机会,这为助力共同富裕提供了新的经验证据。

Rural digital infrastructure construction is an important foundation for promoting the development of digital villages and crucial for building a digital China.Digital infrastructure can provide more convenient information services to rural areas,promote rural informatization,enhance the information literacy of rural residents,and help farmers better understand market demands,thereby improving their production efficiency and economic benefits.However,due to funding,information,and technology gaps,despite some progress made over the years,financial inclusion services in rural areas still fall short,especially in remote,sparsely populated,and inaccessible areas.The establishment of physical bank branches in these areas is often hindered by concerns over cost and profitability,leading to inadequate coverage of formal financial resources and services.The access to high-speed Internet breaks down geographical limitations,lowers the threshold for financial transactions,and allows rural households to access financial products and services such as account opening,fund transfers,wealth management,and loans at a low cost through electronic tools like mobile phones.This greatly enhances the level of financial inclusion for rural households.During the“13th Five-Year Plan”period(2016-2020),China implemented a large-scale universal telecommunication service project in rural areas,building 4G base stations and laying optical fibers in approximately 130,000 administrative villages.This study manually collected data on the pilot villages involved in digital infrastructure construction during this period,totaling around 130,000,and matched it with microdata from the China Household Finance Survey to form a large-scale“village-household”micro-level dataset.Based on this fine geographic scale and household data,this paper employs a large-scale quasi-natural experiment and utilizes the difference-in-differences method to investigate the impact of rural digital infrastructure construction on household financial inclusion.The study finds that during the 2016-2020 period,the construction of digital infrastructure in remote rural areas significantly promoted rural financial inclusion,and this conclusion holds under a series of robustness tests.Mechanism analysis results indicate that rural digital infrastructure construction significantly improves the household information acquisition environment,enhances household financial literacy,and promotes household digital financial usage.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of rural digital infrastructure construction on household participation in formal financial markets is greater for households with lower educational levels,lower per capita income,and greater distances from bank branches.The study demonstrates that the construction of digital infrastructure in remote rural areas alleviates the unequal access to financial resources,enabling low-income households and vulnerable groups to access formal financial services,thus providing new empirical evidence for promoting common prosperity.The marginal contributions of this study are mainly reflected in the following aspects.Firstly,this study is the first to examine the impact of large-scale digital infrastructure construction in remote rural areas during the“13th Five-Year Plan”period on household financial behavior in China.It supplements the existing literature on the influence of informatization on household finance.Secondly,this study contributes to a better understanding of the pathways to promoting financial inclusion in rural areas.Thirdly,this study expands and enriches the existing literature on the impact of technological progress on financial development.From the perspective of digital infrastructure construction in remote rural areas,we investigate the impact of information technology progress on micro-level individual participation in the financial market,providing new perspectives and micro-level evidence for understanding the relationship between information technology and financial development.