Digital Inclusive Finance and Cultural Consumption

With the transformation of the primary contradiction in our society into the contradiction between the growing needs of the people for a better life and the imbalanced and inadequate development, the importance of cultural consumption is increasing day by day. However, there is limited research from the perspective of digital inclusive finance in promoting cultural consumption. Based on provincial panel data from 2011 to 2021 in China, this paper analyzes the intrinsic mechanism of how digital inclusive finance influences cultural consumption from the perspective of cultural innovation using a two-way fixed effects model and a mediation effects model. The study finds that digital inclusive finance can significantly promote residents' cultural consumption, with dimensional heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity existing: the breadth and depth of coverage of digital inclusive finance sub-dimensions can significantly promote residents' cultural consumption, but the degree of digitization inhibits cultural consumption. The promotion effect is significant in the eastern region. The study also finds that cultural innovation plays a mediating role in the relationship between digital inclusive finance and cultural consumption, i.e., digital inclusive finance promotes cultural consumption by enhancing the level of cultural innovation. The scale of participation in literary and artistic activities plays a positive moderating role in the mechanism of promoting urban and rural cultural consumption by digital inclusive finance, i.e., the larger the scale of participation in literary and artistic activities, the stronger the promotion effect of digital inclusive finance on cultural consumption. Through this study, the relationship between digital inclusive finance and cultural consumption is further confirmed empirically, and a cultural innovation intermediary variable is constructed to elucidate the mechanism of how digital inclusive finance influences cultural consumption.