【摘要】 中国小额信贷的广泛积极成效与国际大量负面证据形成反差，这蕴含着独特的“中国经验”。基于长期驻村观察和调研，本文提出农村致富带头人制度与小额信贷的协同机制：信贷帮助农户跨越资金门槛，而致富带头人通过“传、帮、带”提升其生产经营能力，共同形成“1+1>2”的效果。通过构建包含人力资本外溢与信贷约束的农业经济增长模型阐释作用机制，并利用某典型欠发达县近2万户脱贫监测户的独特微观跟踪数据进行实证检验，辅以某地级市和全国层面的数据。研究发现，致富带头人帮扶能够显著强化小额信贷的增收效果，提升增收的可持续性，并且“信贷贴息+致富带头人选育”的政策组合能够大幅提升财政资金使用效率。这一模式是中国特色金融发展之路的重要实践，为全球普惠金融发展、提高财政资金效率、防控小额信贷风险提供了启示与借鉴。更多还原

【Abstract】 An intractable dilemma in global financial poverty alleviation persists: how to ensure that microcredit, a tool mandated to serve the most vulnerable, maintains its inclusiveness while enabling this group to effectively deploy these resources to boost incomes. Numerous microcredit practices worldwide have struggled with this paradox: while economic theories emphasize finance’s role in lifting the poor out of poverty traps, empirical evidence consistently reveals its unstable income effects. By contrast with international counterparts, China’s financial system has emerged as a notable exception: through institutional innovation, its microcredit has achieved remarkable results in poverty alleviation and income growth, boasting strong targeting accuracy that effectively reaches the “the most disadvantaged households”. This raises questions: How has China’s microcredit policy achieved both precise targeting of the poorest groups and robust income growth? Does this practice contain Chinese experience that are worthy of reference and emulation by other countries?To answer these questions, this study systematically synthesizes typical rural financial support practices in China and develops an agricultural economic growth model incorporating human capital spillover effects and credit constraints. The model demonstrates that in underdeveloped regions, two interrelated factors trap rural households in poverty: capital constraints and insufficient human capital. The former can be alleviated through microcredit policies, while the latter requires targeted human capital support. Critically, the combination of microcredit and assistance from rural prosperity pacesetters enables households to escape poverty traps and achieve sustained income growth. We empirically test the model’s predictions using high-quality survey microdata from County M, a typical underdeveloped county in western China. Our dataset integrates two distinct panel datasets: over 10,000 poverty alleviation microcredit records(2014–2022) that document loan disbursement, usage, and repayment, and household-level data from nearly 20,000 rural revitalization monitoring households, which capture income dynamics, human capital indicators(e.g., participation in skill training, entrepreneurial experience), and interactions with rural prosperity pacesetters. We obtain three key findings. First, microcredit exerts limited positive income effects on the poorest rural households, consistent with global empirical evidence. Second, the integrated intervention of microcredit and rural prosperity pacesetters’ targeted assistance generates a substantial average income growth, demonstrating a “1+1>2” synergistic effect. Third, further mechanism tests validate that pacesetters’ assistance effectively enhances rural households’ human capital accumulation, which directly mediates the positive income effect of the policy package.This study’s marginal contribution to the development economics literature is threefold. First, it tackles the long-standing “inclusiveness-effectiveness puzzle” in microcredit research from an innovative perspective of human capital spillovers mediated by rural prosperity pacesetters, which frames pacesetters as key intermediaries of knowledge and skill diffusion, thereby bridging the long-existing theoretical gap between studies centering solely on financial access expansion and those emphasizing human capital’s foundational role in sustainable poverty alleviation. Second, our theoretical model systematically synthesizes and integrates financial friction and human capital theories to formalize the synergistic action mechanism between microcredit and grassroots actors under China’s rural revitalization context, providing a more nuanced analytical framework for characterizing context-specific rural financial support practices and contributing to three core strands of literature: microcredit effectiveness heterogeneity, rural human capital development, and institutional design for policy synergy. Third, our empirical analysis fills the empirical gap regarding rural prosperity pacesetters by providing systematic evidence on their poverty alleviation role, thereby enriching the microcredit literature with rigorous quasi-experimental causal evidence from developing economies.更多还原