Digital Inclusive Finance and Poverty Vulnerability:"Popularizing"or"Benefiting"?——Evidence from Explainable Machine Learning
This paper uses the China Family Tracking Survey(CFPS)and digital financial inclusion indicators to try to clarify the intrinsic relationship between digital financial inclusion and poverty vulnerability through theory and empirical evi-dence,while using the machine learning models to conduct in-depth exploration on the"popularizing"and"benefiting"role of digital financial inclusion.The study finds that digital inclusive finance can reduce the occurrence of household poverty vulnerability in general.Meanwhile,by analyzing the relationship between and among the breadth of coverage,the depth of use and poverty vulnerabil-ity,it is found that the"benefiting"effect brought about by the development of digital inclusive finance is more prominent than the"popularizing"effect.Heterogeneity analysis further reveals that the"popularizing"effect is more effective in more digitized areas,while the"benefiting"effect is more effective in less digitized areas.It's also found that the"popularizing"effect is more prominent for the middle-aged and old-aged groups than the youth group in coastal areas,while the"benefiting"effect is more pronounced for the middle-aged and old-aged groups in non-coastal areas.Based on the above-mentioned conclusions as well as the latest development of digital inclusive finance in China,this pa-per puts forward the following policy recommendations:accelerate the high-quality development of digital inclusive finance in the light of the status of financial inclusion;digital inclusive financial resources should be actively promoted to tilt towards less developed regions;the allocation of digital inclusive financial resources needs to be optimized to realize the role of financial poverty alleviation;and the guiding role of financial policies needs to be strengthened to achieve China's common prosperity goal.
Digital Inclusive FinancePoverty VulnerabilityCommon ProsperityMachine Learning
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
