ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Hum. Dyn.
Sec. Digital Impacts
Can Digital Financial Inclusion Promote Counties' Industrial Structure Upgrading?
Provisionally accepted
- Yan'an University, Yan'an, China
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Industrial structure upgrading is the core driving force for high-quality economic development and rural revitalization in China, yet the county-level industrial structure suffers from severe structural imbalances, and digital financial inclusion has become a critical financial support tool for promoting county-level industrial restructuring. Based on panel data of 1,772 counties in China, threshold regression models are adopted to empirically investigate the nonlinear impact of digital financial inclusion (DFI) on industrial structure upgrading (ISU). The results show that DFI has a significant double threshold effect on ISU, with its promotional effect rising from 2.08% to 3.40% and then falling to 2.82% across successive threshold stages; a 1% increase in DFI can drive a typical county with a GDP of RMB 30 billion to achieve an annual increase of RMB 13.92 million to 22.74 million in tertiary industry output via resource reallocation from manufacturing to high-value-added services. Among the three core sub-dimensions of DFI, digitization level is the foundational driver of its overall effect on ISU, and DFI optimizes county-level industrial structure through two channels of boosting manufacturing output and facilitating regional innovation. In addition, the promotional effect of DFI on ISU presents obvious heterogeneity, which is more pronounced in non-national-level poor counties and counties outside contiguous areas of dire poverty. This study enriches the literature on the relationship between DFI and ISU at the county level and provides actionable policy insights for governments in regions with backward industrial structures to leverage DFI for industrial upgrading.
Keywords: County-Level of China, Digital financial inclusion, Economic Policy Research, Industrial structure upgrading, Threshold regression
Received: 15 Jan 2026; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Jiao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chen Jiao
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