Digital Villages Construction Accelerates High-Quality Economic Development in Rural China through Promoting Digital Entrepreneurship

Abstract

“Digital villages construction” and “high-quality economic development” are both key topics to the sustainable development in China. Chinese has attached great importance to agriculture and rural development in recent years, thus exploring the connections between the two topics from a rural perspective is of practical importance. This paper aims to see if there is a connection between digital village construction and high-quality economic development, and how the digital village construction accelerates the high-quality development of the rural economy. After building the index system, this paper evaluates present development level of digitalization and high-quality economy in rural areas by the Entropy Weight TOPSIS method and empirically tests the direct and indirect effect of rural digital construction on the high-quality rural economic development relatively based on the fixed effect model and the mediation effect model. To study deeply, four major regions and five influence paths are analyzed, respectively. The results show that there is a positive correlation between the construction of digital villages and the high-quality development of rural economy. Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial activity of digital industries is a crucial mechanism for digital villages construction to promote the high-quality development of rural economy. This paper innovatively builds relevant index systems and analyzes the transmission mechanism of digitalization to high-quality development from a rural perspective, though it analyzes at the provincial level, which is less specific. Overall, it will be beneficial for economics researchers who study digital economy and rural development and policy makers who give counsel for economic development.

Spatial-Temporal Variations and Driving Factors of the Coupling and Coordination Level of the Digital Economy and Sustainable Rural Development: A Case Study of China

“…The "Internet+" technology refers to the penetration and integration of new generational information technologies such as big data and the Internet of Things into economic fields, promoting the development model of digital, intelligent, and information transformation of manufacturing enterprises [18]. It strengthens information exchange between regions, breaking information barriers between urban and rural areas as well as between domestic and foreign markets [19]. It also establishes a rural-urban link for knowledge workers, thereby facilitating information exchange and labor mobility [20].…”

The impact of the digital economy on high-quality agricultural development——Based on the regulatory effects of financial development

“…Mei Y (2022) empirically tested the direct and indirect impacts of rural digital construction on the high-quality development of the rural economy based on a fixed effect model and an intermediary effect model and found a positive correlation between digital village construction and the high-quality development of the rural economy. The digital industry’s entrepreneurial activities are an important mechanism for digital rural construction to promote the high-quality development of the rural economy [ 29 ]. Tang Y (2022) based on China’s provincial panel data from 2011 to 2020, studied the influence mechanism of agricultural digitalization on the agricultural field by adopting the bidirectional fixed effect model and threshold effect test model and noted that agricultural digitalization was conducive to promoting high-quality agricultural development [ 30 ].…”

Can E-commerce development policies promote the high-quality development of agriculture?—A quasi-natural experiment based on a China’s E-commerce demonstration city

“…Such as carbon trading [ 29 , 30 ], digital inclusive amount [ 31 ], environmental regulation [ 32 ], technological progress [ 33 ] etc. Many scholars have tested the influencing factors of high-quality agricultural development from different perspectives, for example, business environment [ 23 ], factor allocation [ 34 ], Ecological efficiency [ 24 ], market-oriented reform [ 35 ], agricultural digitalization [ 36 , 37 ], technological progress [ 33 ]. The method research of high-quality agricultural development generally adopts the location entropy index [ 38 – 40 ], panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model [ 23 , 34 , 40 ], Data envelopment analysis (DEA) [ 33 ], and SBM Undesired model [ 41 ].…”