How Does Inclusive Finance Achieve Precise Poverty Alleviation?

Zhu Yiming, Wang Wei

Journal of Finance and Economics Vol. 43, Issue 10, pp. 43 - 54 (2017)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2017.10.004

Abstract

How does inclusive finance affect poverty reduction and income growth exactly? Can different income groups benefit from the development of inclusive finance equally? This paper conducts an empirical research based on the data of 2018 counties in China, to study the heterogeneous effects of inclusive finance development on poverty reduction and income growth of different income groups and the internal mechanism via 2SLS model and IVQR model.The results show that the development of inclusive finance is beneficial to the increase in rural residents' income.However, the role of inclusive finance development in poverty reduction and income increase varies with income groups, and the role in poverty reduction and income increase of rural residents in poor counties is significantly smaller than that in non-poor counties.The lack of economic opportunities in poor areas and poor populations endogenously determines the heterogeneity of the poverty reduction effect of inclusive finance.Further studies show that economic growth is an important mechanism of the promotion role of inclusive finance in poverty reduction and income growth.As to poverty counties, the role of inclusive finance in poverty reduction and income growth is largely attributed to the mediating effect of economic growth to a large extent.Therefore, as for the promotion of inclusive finance development, poor and non-poor counties should implement different targeting mechanisms to avoid "targeting bias", and improve the efficiency of financial resources allocation and the precision of poverty alleviation.

Keywords

inclusive finance; mediating effect; poverty reduction and income growth; instrumental variable quantile regression