Abstract: By making use of the statistical data of China’s rural financial development from 1990 to 2009 and employing the multiple linear regression model, this paper conducts an empirical analysis of the influence of the scale, efficiency and structure of rural financial development and the distribution density of rural financial resources on the increase of farmers’ income. The results show that only the increase of loan-to-deposit ratio of rural financial institutions and the increase of the number of practitioners in rural financial institutions per ten thousand people can play a significant role in promoting the increase of farmers’ income, while the expansion of rural deposit scale, the improvement of township enterprises’ loan ratio and the increase of number of rural financial institutions per ten thousand people do not play a significant role in promoting the growth of farmers’ income. Therefore, this paper proposes that in order to really benefit farmers and low-income groups from the new policy of incremental reform of China’s rural finance, this round of incremental reform must advance steadily, the number of new financial institutions should not expand blindly, and the national exogenous leading mode should be gradually transformed into the private endogenous growth mode, so as to improve the contribution of the rural financial development to the farmers’ income growth.

Key words: rural financial development; incremental reform; increase of farmers’ income