Whether Digital Financial Inclusion Can Improve Capital Misallocation or Not: A Study Based on the Moderating Effect of Economic Policy Uncertainty

This paper discusses the impact of digital financial inclusion on regional capital’s turn from the fictitious to the substantial economy. The continuous decline of the capital efficiency of the real economy is an important reason for the misallocation of financial capital, such as the financialization of real enterprises. Development of the digital financial inclusion helps to relieve small and micro businesses from financing constraints, encourage civilian consumption, and improve services concerning issues of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers. Yet, its financial features also indicate potential systematic risks, manifested as the capital’s departure from its intended purpose of serving the substantial economy, given some beneficiaries’ investment in the fictitious economy. Based on the provincial panel data between 2011 and 2019, this paper constructs an index describing capital’s diversion from the fictitious to the substantial economy. This paper then analyzes the impact of digital financial inclusion on such a diversion of the regional capital, investigating the regulatory effects caused by the uncertainty in economic policies. Empirical study reveals that digital financial inclusion has an evident positive effect on regional capital’s diversion from the fictitious to the substantial economy but without any spatial spillover effect. Among the three subdimensions of digital financial inclusion-scope of coverage, depth of usage, and level of digitalization, the scope of coverage has the strongest positive effect, and digitization level, the weakest. The positive correlation between digital financial inclusion and capital diversion from the fictitious to the substantial economy is under negative regulation due to economic policy uncertainty. In other words, increasing uncertainty in the economic policy would weaken digital financial inclusion’s support of the substantial economy.