Rural Residents’ Digital Payment: The Use and Its Impact on Credit Availability – Evidence Using Extended UTAUT2

In recent years, the essential roles of digital payment have gradually emerged. However, current research on digital payment adoption models rarely incorporates the outcomes of digital payment, and it also gives less consideration to rural residents. Considering these two issues as a research gap, this article establishes a unified digital payment use and credit availability model by extending the UTAUT2 framework in two aspects and applying it to China’s rural residents. The first extension is to add credit availability as an outcome variable of digital payment use. The second is to add two factors important to farmers, perceived riskiness and innovativeness, as constructs. Structural equation modeling is employed to analyze data collected from nearly 500 Chinese rural residents. The results show that almost 90% of rural residents have used digital payment. However, only a low proportion use it for many purposes or frequently. Rural residents’ digital payment use can increase credit availability. Performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influence, price value, and innovativeness significantly and positively affect digital payment intention and behavior, thereby indirectly improving credit availability. However, the perceived risk does not influence digital payment adoption, possibly due to effective protective behaviors. In addition to the indirect effect, the results show that innovativeness also has a direct impact on credit availability. JEL Classification : M15, G21.