Modern Social Science Research

Against the backdrop of high-quality development of digital finance becoming a key regulatory priority, this paper constructs an exploratory quarterly empirical model based on data from the People’s Bank of China on the operation of the payment system from the first quarter of 2022 to the fourth quarter of 2024, statistical reports on the allocation of financial institutions’ loans, and regulatory indicator data released by the National Financial Regulatory Administration, in order to examine the relationship between the expansion of mobile payments and the growth of inclusive loans to micro and small enterprises. The results show that, first, mobile payment transaction value and the balance of inclusive micro and small business loans exhibited a clear synchronous upward trend during the sample period. Second, in the logarithmic model, after controlling for a linear time trend, the elasticity coefficient of mobile payment transaction value is 0.231 and is significant at the 1% level, indicating a stable positive correlation between the deepening of payment digitalization and the expansion of inclusive credit. Third, in the growth-rate model, the coefficient of mobile payment transaction value growth is 0.241, which is also significant at the 1% level. However, the number of mobile payment transactions becomes insignificant after the inclusion of the time trend, suggesting that what truly matters is more likely to be high-value payment scenarios and data accumulation, rather than merely an increase in transaction frequency.

Digital technology; Mobile payment; Inclusive finance; Micro and small business loans; Data analysis