Does Digital Inclusive Finance Enhance the Creation of County Enterprises? Taking Henan Province as a Case Study

Abstract

The broad inclusiveness of digital inclusive finance is essential for promoting coordinated regional development. This paper focuses on the impact of digital inclusive finance on creating county enterprises, discussing its heterogeneity in terms of region and type of entrepreneurship and revealing the mechanisms by which this set of impacts works. The methodology integrates the 2015–2020 Peking University Digital Inclusive Finance Index, business registration data from the industrial and commercial sectors and statistics from counties in Henan Province. The results show that digital inclusive finance can significantly promote the creation of county enterprises. All secondary dimension indices show positive effects; this result remains when replacing the core explanatory variables and lagged terms. Heterogeneity analysis finds no significant heterogeneity in the entrepreneurial effect of digital inclusive finance between urban and rural areas and types of entrepreneurship. The mechanism analysis finds that digital inclusive finance can promote the creation of county enterprises through two paths: improved financing and mobile payment. These findings reveal that we should use digital inclusive finance to improve the breadth and depth of financial services within the county and take advantage of its mobile payments to promote micro and small businesses.