Digital Financial Ecosystems and Trade-Related Working Capital Finance: Firm-Level Evidence from 39 Economies

How firms finance purchases and inventories may depend increasingly on the digital financial environment in which they operate, but cross-economy evidence on trade credit and customer advances remains limited. We merge firm-level Enterprise Survey records with digital finance, insurance, digital infrastructure, and macroeconomic indicators. The complete-case sample comprises 32,049 firms across 39 economies surveyed during 2014–2020. Conventional digital finance and insurance capacity are positively associated with percentage, fractional share, and adoption outcomes across OLS, fractional logit, and logit specifications. The interaction between mobile money and digital infrastructure is negative but only marginally significant for adoption, supporting a diminishing adoption association at the 10% level; it is nonsignificant for percentage and fractional outcomes and is absent among existing users. Nonlife digital readiness negatively moderates the fractional share at the 5% level and adoption at the 10% level, but not the OLS percentage outcome. Alternative received and granted trade credit outcomes yield positive interaction signs, indicating that the estimated relationships are sensitive to the specific working capital outcome examined. Overall, the findings support a disaggregated ecosystem perspective but remain associational because national exposures are not randomly assigned and the data are repeated across sections.