The Impact of a Move to Mobile Payments

Does paying with mobile digital payments increase consumers’ marginal propensity to consume? If there is to be an increase in the use of mobile payments this has implications for consumers, merchants and governments. A paper from Claremont Graduate University sets out to answer this ¹.

In 2019 in China 347.1 trillion yuan ($55 trillion) was spent using mobile payments and just under 250 trillion yuan ($39 trillion) using third party mobile transaction providers, primarily Alipay and WeChat Pay. Alibaba, an e-commerce platform, started Alipay in 2008 and WeChat Pay, part of the WeChat social media and messaging platform, started in 2013. In China, these two platforms have 90% market share. 94.87% of participants in the research ‘usually’ or ‘always’ used these platforms.