Digital Inclusive Financial Popularization and China's SME Financing Constraints

The problem of financing constraints has always been an important factor restricting the development of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and digital inclusive finance has also been increasingly developed to become a powerful helper in alleviating the financing constraints of the enterprises. Based on the provincial panel data of digital inclusive finance from 2011 to 2020, the paper focuses on analyzing the improvement of SMEs' financing constraints by the development of digital inclusive finance and its secondary indicators covering depth, breadth, and digitization degree, specifically from the nature of the enterprise's shareholding and the economic location of the province where the enterprise operates to perform the heterogeneity analysis. The empirical results show that the development of digital inclusive finance can significantly improve the problem of SME financing constraints, especially for non-state-owned enterprises and enterprises located in the eastern provinces, the mitigating effect is the strongest, and the degree of digitization of digital inclusive finance has the best effect on the improvement of enterprise financing constraints among the three secondary indicators. Therefore, this paper suggests that digital inclusive finance should continue to strengthen the universality, strengthen the digitization degree of digital inclusive finance as well as the guiding role of the government policy, and promote the various types of enterprises in all regions of China to broaden the financing channels and improve the source of funds, so as to promote the benign development of China's enterprises and economic prosperity.