Digital Inclusive Finance and Financing Constraints - A Study Based on Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

As an important part of China's economy, manufacturing firms have a fundamental impact on promoting high-quality economic growth. Digital inclusive finance is developing rapidly with its characteristics of digitization and other features, which is expected to alleviate the financing constraints of manufacturing firms. This paper selects manufacturing enterprises from 2011 to 2022 as the research object, and empirically examines the role and influence mechanism of digital inclusive finance on the financing constraints of manufacturing enterprises.The findings from the study indicate that there exists a substantial inverse relationship between digital inclusive finance and the financial limitations faced by manufacturers.In particular, the digital inclusive finance index has a more important negative relationship with financing constraints for enterprises with a high average age of management and high digitization level. In addition, digital inclusive finance can also reduce firms' financing constraints by breaking information asymmetry and reducing firms' leverage.