The role of digital inclusive finance in green innovation

by Cheng Chen, Min Fan, Yaojun Fan

As environmental issues become more acute, green innovation has become a key driver in advancing environmental sustainability and a comprehensive green transition, paving the way towards a future of ’clear waters and blue skies’ and enhanced environmental quality. In this vein, financial support is deemed an important facilitator of green innovation. Nonetheless, traditional financial institutions often restrict investment in such projects due to biases surrounding the returns of green projects and difficulties in risk assessment. The rise of digital inclusive finance offers new insights into addressing this challenge. Drawing on data from Chinese A-share listed companies between 2014 and 2019 and employing a multidimensional fixed-effect model, this paper systematically investigates the impact and mechanisms of action of digital inclusive finance on corporate green innovation. The study finds that digital inclusive finance significantly spurs green innovation within enterprises; this finding remains robust following a series of robustness checks and the addressing of endogeneity concerns. The facilitative effect is more pronounced in non-state-owned enterprises and areas with stricter environmental regulations. Digital inclusive finance supports green innovation mainly through two pathways: ’funding effects,’ related to easing financing constraints and reducing transaction costs, and ’responsibility effects,’ pertaining to the enhancement of corporate social responsibility. Additionally, green innovation driven by digital inclusive finance further improves the quality of the ecological environment, leading to increased total factor productivity and overall corporate performance. This paper enriches the externalities research of digital inclusive finance, providing theoretical foundations and practical insights to foster the synergistic development of digital inclusive finance and green innovation.