Digital Financial Inclusion and Poverty-Alleviation Resilience of Chinese Rural Households

As the anti-poverty process is dynamic and stochastic and low-income communities are vulnerable to various shocks and stressors, scholars have rapidly embraced the concept of resilience. Motivated by the fact that China has achieved significant progress in eliminating absolute poverty and has quickly developed digital financial inclusion (DFI), utilizing data from the China Household Finance Survey for 2013–2019 and Peking University’s DFI data, this study measures the poverty-alleviation resilience (PAR) of rural Chinese households (split into poverty-eradication and development resilience) and thoroughly analyzes the influence of DFI on PAR. The study finds that (1) DFI improves poverty-eradication and development resilience, and the impact of DFI on development resilience is higher than that of poverty-eradication resilience. This suggests that rural households effectively utilize DFI to improve resilience after escaping poverty. (2) DFI affects the PAR by improving financial literacy, easing credit constraints, and enhancing risk-coping capacities. (3) DFI positively influences PAR for rural households that do not receive pro-poor transfer income, while the impact of DFI on PAR of households who receive pro-poor transfer income is insignificant. Moreover, regional heterogeneity in the impact exists across regions.