Analysis of Inclusive Financial Development and Poverty Governance in Eastern, Central and Western China

Abstract

Current problem of tackling poverty in China has been effectively solved, and the scale of the poor has been greatly reduced. However, the task of achieving comprehensive poverty alleviation across the country in 2020 remains daunting. Financial poverty alleviation strategies, especially vigorously developing inclusive finance is one of the effective ways to achieve comprehensive poverty alleviation. This paper aims to test whether inclusive finance policies has positive effects on our poverty alleviation work. We select nine provinces panel data, constructing the inclusive financial index in three dimensions: financial support, permeability, and accessibility. Based on the calculated inclusive financial index, this paper establishes a regression with income poverty, educational poverty and medical poverty as explained variables, inclusive financial index as explanatory variable, and control variables such as economic growth, local education level, and local medical level. The results show that the level of inclusive financial development has a significant positive impact on the income poverty. However, when it comes to educational and medical poverty alleviation, the improvement of the inclusive financial level in a short period does not reflect obvious promotion effects, but has negative impacts. Finally, we suggest the government that continuously improve the accessibility of inclusive financial services; increase the distribution of outlets of inclusive financial institutions, specifically by adding inclusive financial institutions, ATMs, financial poverty alleviation service stations, etc.; and constantly improve financial infrastructure to better provide financial services and improve the availability of inclusive financial services.