Digital Financial Inclusion and Corporate Financing Constraints: An Empirical Investigation of Regional Digitization Heterogeneity

DOI: https://doi.org/10.62517/jel.202614317

Author(s)

Jingyi Zhou

Affiliation(s)

International Business School, Dongbei University of Finance and Economics, Dalian, Liaoning, China *Corresponding author

Abstract

Within the broader context of rapid digital economic expansion and the structural transformation of financial services, the capacity of digital financial inclusion to ease corporate capital access constraints has emerged as a significant concern in contemporary finance scholarship. Drawing on a panel dataset constructed from Chinese A-share non-financial listed firms for the period 2015–2019 and 2021, this study examines how digital financial inclusion shapes corporate financing behavior while simultaneously incorporating regional digitization heterogeneity to explore the channels through which such effects operate, the structural variation in outcomes, and the threshold conditions that govern effectiveness. The empirical findings reveal that digital financial inclusion broadly functions to reduce firms' financing barriers—yet this reduction is neither automatic nor uniformly distributed. Its impact is primarily mediated by three pathways: enhanced informational transparency, lower transaction-related borrowing costs, and improved credit accessibility. Structurally, state-owned enterprises capture measurably greater benefits compared with privately held firms, suggesting that digital finance expansion does not dismantle entrenched credit allocation hierarchies or overturn existing patterns of resource distribution. Furthermore, the regional intensity of digitization constitutes a binding boundary condition for realizing the benefits of digital financial inclusion, exhibiting pronounced threshold nonlinearity: only once a region's digital infrastructure surpasses a critical threshold value do the constraint-alleviating properties of digital finance become more comprehensively activated. Taken together, the findings underscore that digital financial inclusion does not function as a context-independent instrument; its practical efficacy is contingent on the joint advancement of digital finance development, regional digitization, and improvements in the corporate credit environment.

Keywords

Digital Financial Inclusion; Financing Constraints; Regional Digitization Heterogeneity; Transmission Mechanisms; Threshold Effects

References

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