An in-depth analysis of the entrepreneurship of rural Chinese mothers and the digital inclusive finance

Abstract

Rural mothers' entrepreneurial behavior is critical to promoting inclusive rural economic development. However, these women are constrained by family responsibilities, economic substandard and severe financial exclusion. Fortunately, the development of digital inclusive finance has successfully broken such exclusions, thus allowing entrepreneur mothers to achieve some financial success. Applying the 2017 China General Social Survey and the Peking University Digital Inclusive Finance Index, this paper explores the impact of digital inclusive finance on rural mothers' entrepreneurship and the transmission mechanism using the Probit model. In fact, due to digital inclusive finance, rural mothers' entrepreneurship increased by 4.6%. In addition, this paper finds the impact of this digital inclusive finance on entrepreneurship, in general, is more significant on mothers in less developed areas and with high levels of education than on those in developed regions and with low levels of education. Meanwhile, using the transmission mechanism for analysis, the paper found the role of digital inclusive finance in inciting entrepreneurship among rural mothers. This mainly comes through two channels: the gender equality effect and the information learning effect.