The Role of Microfinance in China’s Rural Public Health: Evidence from the Anti-Poverty Microcredit Program

This study presents nonlinear evidence of the effects of a microcredit program implemented in poverty-stricken villages in China on rural public health using multivariate-ordered Probit and IV-ordered Probit models. The results, which were based on a unique set of data gathered from two rounds of official tracking statistics obtained through investigation (2015 and 2018) at a household level, suggest that rural residents’ health levels and health insurance demands are related to the formal credit amount that they receive from the microcredit program. Further, the amount of debt that remains to be paid is a negative mediator and the poverty reduction degree is a positive mediator for the health impact of credit. After dividing the sample into subgroups according to income, credit rating and social network, the results show heterogeneity: the health outcomes of groups with a low income, a high credit rating and a strong social network are more significantly improved by loans. The estimations are still robust after using network and village clan numbers as instrumental variables to address endogeneity. Although most of the existing literature demonstrates that credit and indebtedness have negative impacts on health, our results supplement previous findings of the positive causality between access to formal credit and rural public health by showing that the former can exert positive effects by relaxing individuals’ external constraints and increasing health spending.