As the marginal benefits of traditional material capital investments decline, the 2025 “Govern- ment Work Report” and the 14th Five-Year Plan explicitly propose a strategic orientation towards investing in people. How to leverage fiscal resources to favor sectors such as education, healthcare, vocational skills training, and social security, thereby driving high-quality development, has become an urgent practical issue to explore. It is worth noting that there are significant disparities in the scale and structure of expenditure invested in people across different regions, with particularly prominent shortcomings in public services in underdeveloped areas. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses on the following core questions: Will governments investing in people effectively boost resident consumption? What is the underlying mechanism? Are there significant differences in the impact across different regions?

This paper uses panel data from China’s prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2022 to construct a two-way fixed effects model for empirical testing. The benchmark regression results show that investing in people significantly promotes the growth of resident consumption, and the conclusion remains valid under various robustness checks. Mechanism testing confirms the existence of both direct and indirect paths. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the consumption-boosting effect of investing in people is significantly stronger in low- and middle-income-intensive areas such as western regions, rural areas, and small and medium-sized cities than in developed regions, which is highly consistent with the expectations of the marginal propensity to consume theory.

This paper makes the following contributions: In terms of the research perspective, it breaks through the traditional framework of fiscal analysis that focuses on investing in physical assets and focuses on investing in people, an emerging type of expenditure; in terms of the theoretical mechanism, it organically combines the theories of inclusiveness and marginal propensity to consume with indirect paths such as human capital, income, and innovation; in terms of empirical evidence, through regional heterogeneity analysis, it reveals that investing in people can be precisely tailored to low- and middle-income-intensive areas, providing solid support for the optimization and transformation of fiscal expenditure structure from physical assets to people.