| China's economy has shifted from high-speed growth to high-quality development.Accelerating the transformation of old and new dynamics is an inevitable choice to achieve high-quality development.As a new driving force for China's high-quality economic development,the digital economy represented by ecommerce has profoundly changed the traditional economic structure of China.Digital technology is rapidly spreading in China's rural areas.The digital countryside featuring networking,informatization,and digitization is an important application of digital technology in agriculture and rural areas' economic and social development.Empowering rural development with digital technology is an important strategy for building "digital China," "rural revitalization," and "digital countryside." It is also an inevitable requirement for implementing high-quality economic development in China.It is also a requirement for the implementation of China's high-quality economic development.Furthermore,through digital technology,rural areas are connected to the global market,which promotes a new development pattern of domestic and international circulation.Therefore,in the context of China's digital economy development strategy,this paper focuses on the impact of digital transformation,represented by high-speed Internet access and ecommerce,on the economic development of China's rural areas and its micromechanisms.The construction of rural infrastructure projects in China has gone through different stages,from the initial traditional infrastructure such as roads,electricity,drinking water,telephone network,radio,and television,to the current new generation of rural information infrastructure such as optical fiber and fourthgeneration communication base stations(hereafter referred to as 4G base stations).The whole rural infrastructure construction is evolving in the direction of networking,informatization,and digitalization.From 2015 to 2019,the central government and basic telecommunication enterprises have invested more than 60 billion yuan to build fiber optic and 4G base stations in remote rural areas.As of August 2019,the access ratio of fiber optic and 4G networks in administrative villages in China exceeded 98%.The goal of "same network and same speed" in rural cities was achieved in terms of network speed.At the same time,to build rural e-commerce development,the state-supported the construction of 1,185 demonstration counties from 2014 to 2019,investing about 23.7 billion yuan in funding.Thus,it can be seen that in the past five years,the state has invested nearly100 billion yuan in the new generation of rural information infrastructure,mainly4 G base stations and e-commerce.What impact does the construction of new generation rural information infrastructure have on economic development? And what are the impact mechanisms? This is not only a concern for policymakers but also a major question in academic research.This paper will systematically answer this question.Factor redistribution in the agricultural sector is an important feature of the economic development process.Economic structural transformation is mainly reflected in the allocation of labor production factors from the relatively low productivity agricultural sector to the relatively high non-agricultural sector(manufacturing or service).At the same time,rural areas in China are constrained by geographic location and other factors,facing greater trade costs and smaller market potential,making it difficult to integrate into the unified domestic market.Digital development in rural areas lowers market access barriers and helps them connect to external markets,which in turn facilitates the larger domestic cycle.The reduction in transaction costs brought about by digital transformation plays an important role in this.This paper focuses on the impact of digital transformation on the economic development of rural areas in China from the perspective of digital transformation,using the causal identification method of quasi-natural experiments,and further reveals its micromechanisms.In addition,this paper focuses on the interaction mechanism between digitalization and rural households' consumption welfare.Specifically,the research contents and findings of this paper are as follows.First,the allocation of rural labor factors from the lower-productivity agricultural sector to the nonfarm sector is an important path for economic development.This paper first investigates the role of high-speed Internet access on the allocation of rural labor factors micro-mechanisms.Specifically,this paper investigates the impact of high-speed Internet access on the economy's structural transformation using a quasi-natural experiment of large-scale high-speed Internet access in rural areas brought about by the telecommunication universal service project during China's 13 th Five-Year Plan.From 2016 to 2019,the universal service project has invested more than 60 billion yuan to provide high-speed Internet access to 130,000 administrative villages in China.To identify the impact of the universal service project at the administrative village level,this paper manually collects data on the list of 130,000 pilot administrative villages.It matches them with geographic microdata such as the China Household Finance Survey(CHFS)to form a new "administrative village-household" database.Based on this database,this paper analyzes whether the construction of rural information infrastructure helps small and micro e-commerce enterprises to enter and promote economic development and structural transformation in rural areas.The study finds that high-speed Internet access significantly contributes to per capita household income growth,which still holds after a series of robustness tests.High-speed Internet access was measured to have boosted household per capita income by an average of 14.43% over the sample period.Mechanism analysis reveals that the income effect of high-speed Internet access may be due to the increase in nonfarm employment opportunities brought about by the growth of micro and small e-commerce enterprises.Specifically,this paper finds that high-speed Internet access not only promotes household mobile Internet use and boosts the total number of households operating e-commerce in administrative villages but also boosts the number of registered individual stores and business firms in Taobao in the county.Further analysis found that high-speed Internet access increased the probability of household nonfarm employment by an average of 2.83%.Heterogeneity analysis found that the income effect of high-speed Internet access was relatively larger in remote areas.These results suggest that highspeed Internet access in administrative villages facilitates the entry of small and micro e-commerce enterprises,which increases the probability of household nonfarm employment and thus increases household income levels.This study reveals that information infrastructure development in rural areas(especially in remote areas)is an important driver for reducing the urban-rural income gap and promoting shared prosperity.Second,rural areas often face greater trade costs and smaller market potential,and e-commerce helps overcome trade costs for economic growth by reducing transaction costs due to information asymmetry through digital information platforms.This paper investigates the role and mechanism of e-commerce development on economic growth.Specifically,based on county-level data from2000-2017,this paper investigates the impact of e-commerce development on county economic growth using a quasi-natural experiment of "comprehensive demonstration counties of e-commerce into rural areas" jointly conducted by the Ministry of Finance,the Ministry of Commerce,and the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office from 2014-2017.The study finds that e-commerce development significantly enhances county economic growth in China.At the same time,other explanations are excluded as much as possible by controlling for pilot selection criteria,controlling for other policies during the same period,and using a subsample of "comprehensive demonstration counties of e-commerce into rural areas." The mechanism analysis finds that the e-commerce into rural demonstration counties program significantly promotes local e-commerce businesses,represented by Taobao villages.In addition,e-commerce development reduces trade costs and helps to connect markets in areas with low market potential,thus promoting regional economic growth.Further heterogeneity analysis reveals that the impact of ecommerce development on economic growth is greater in regions with higher education levels and younger demographics.This phenomenon suggests that the development of emerging technologies and industries requires the support of human capital.This study shows that the development of digital technology-based ecommerce significantly contributes to regional economic growth.This study reveals that the development of rural e-commerce is an important driving force for building a unified national market and smoothing the national circulation.Finally,based on the micro household consumption welfare perspective,this paper answers the role of the construction of e-commerce service points on local household consumption welfare.Due to the low human capital and weak digital technology application ability of farmers,e-commerce service points provide villagers with services such as online shopping on their behalf,which solves the transaction barriers faced by farmers in searching and online payment.In addition,the smaller size of local markets and lower market accessibility in rural areas lead to higher trade costs,and the construction of e-commerce service points in administrative villages helps shorten the distance between farm households and markets,increases the variety of goods purchased by households,and improves the welfare of residents.Specifically,this paper investigates the impact of the number of rural e-commerce service points on online household consumption by matching the number of the administrative village online shopping points with household microdata and using the policy shock of the "E-commerce in Rural Demonstration County Program" as an instrumental variable.The study found that the construction of rural e-commerce service points significantly boosted online household consumption.Heterogeneity analysis found that the impact of e-commerce service points on online household consumption was greater in administrative villages with lower human capital.It was also found that the effect of e-commerce service points on online consumption was greater in administrative villages with smaller local markets,more remote,non-plain,and farther from markets.These results suggest that e-commerce service point construction reduces transaction barriers on the one hand and trade costs on the other.Further analysis reveals that e-commerce service point construction significantly promotes diversity of household online consumption,increases online consumption frequency,and does not crowd out household non-online consumption.This study reveals that e-commerce service points help promote new types of consumption and provide new empirical evidence for overall consumption promotion.In the context of China's digital economy development strategy and based on existing research in related literature,the possible innovations in research data and methods,research perspectives,and research contents of this paper are as follows.First,in terms of data use and research methods,this paper has some innovative points by using multi-source data and quasi-natural experiments.(1)In terms of multi-source data use,this paper collects for the first time the data of about 130,000 administrative villages in the 13 th Five-Year Plan period and matches them with the geographic location data of the Chinese household micro-survey to form the "administrative village-household " The database is not only more detailed but also more varied.This database is not only more detailed and with greater variation(variation)but also better reflects the actual situation of high-speed Internet access in each region,providing more reliable data support for the causal identification in this paper.For analyzing the entry of micro and small e-commerce enterprises,this paper uses nationwide administrative village survey data as well as Ali Research Institute micro and small e-commerce individual and enterprise registration data.These multi-source data provide a new research dataset for studying the impact of high-speed Internet access on economic development.(2)In terms of causal identification,existing studies are often difficult to assess the economic impact of high-speed Internet due to the lack of micro-scale data and the endogeneity of highspeed Internet access.For example,in urban areas,broadband infrastructure construction is often related to regional economic development,and the time of broadband infrastructure construction varies less between cities,so it is difficult to capture the exogenous changes of broadband access.In this paper,based on the quasi-natural experiment of large-scale high-speed Internet construction during the13 th Five-Year Plan period,we use a double-difference approach to make causal inferences and further control the pilot selection criteria to overcome the endogeneity problem caused by the selectivity bias,taking into account the selectivity of high-speed Internet access in the actual construction process.Similarly,in studying the impact of e-commerce development on economic growth,this paper is also based on a quasi-natural experiment brought about by the policy of largescale construction of rural e-commerce,using a double-difference causal inference framework.At the same time,considering the endogeneity problem caused by the selective bias of the actual pilot areas(e-commerce demonstration counties are preferentially piloted in poor national counties and underdeveloped revolutionary old areas),this paper also further controls the pilot selection criteria of e-commerce demonstration counties to overcome the identification problem caused by the above selective bias.This not only helps to understand the impact of rural digitalization on economic development comprehensively but also helps to more accurately assess the impact effects of rural digitalization policies.Second,in terms of research perspective,unlike previous studies,this paper is based on a relatively new research perspective of rural digital transformation,focusing on three aspects of rural high-speed Internet access,rural e-commerce,and rural e-commerce service points(see the text for details of the content and logical relationships of these three aspects).Specifically,(1)in the area of rural high-speed Internet access,this paper focuses on the impact of high-speed Internet access on labor factor allocation,which provides a new perspective for understanding the drivers in the process of structural transformation.Previous studies have focused on the increase in agricultural labor productivity and how international trade affects the allocation of labor from the agricultural to the nonagricultural sector but have neglected the role of information infrastructure.The research in this paper shows that weak information infrastructure is an important barrier to the allocation of labor from the agricultural sector to the nonfarm sector.Transportation costs,search costs,and trade costs are important components of the economic costs of rural labor markets,which may impede the allocation of rural labor factors.This paper finds that information infrastructure can reduce these economic costs and enable remote rural areas to integrate with other commodity and labor markets across the country,which provides more concrete and micro-level empirical evidence for understanding structural transformation in rural areas.(2)In terms of rural e-commerce development,the inclusion of less developed regions in the economic development process,and thus inclusive growth,is an important topic of interest for scholars and governments both domestically and internationally.Compared with transportation infrastructure,e-commerce may not only expand market accessibility through information technology but also help stimulate the vitality of various rural market players,thus releasing the endogenous power of rural development.This paper finds that e-commerce does promote the economic development of China's counties and reduces the constraints of geographical factors on economic growth in remote areas,while regional human capital contributes to the economic benefits of e-commerce.These findings provide new empirical support and theoretical reference for further promotion and optimization of relevant policies and provide certain insights for exploring the path of achieving inclusive growth in China under the new stage.(3)In terms of rural e-commerce service points,compared with previous studies that focused on urban areas,households face greater consumption inequality in China's remote villages due to smaller local markets as well as lower market accessibility.This paper explores the role of e-commerce service points in rural areas in promoting online household consumption from the large-scale construction of rural e-commerce service points in China,which provides a new perspective to the literature on reducing urban-rural consumption inequality.Third,in terms of research content,previous studies on rural digitalization and economic development have been mainly at the macro level,and macro-level analysis not only faces more serious endogeneity problems but also fails to explore micromechanisms in detail.Unlike previous studies,this paper provides specific micro-mechanisms for the impact of the digital countryside on economic development in terms of promoting structural transformation,expanding market potential,and reducing transaction barriers and trade costs,respectively.Specifically,they are as follows:(1)Facilitating structural transformation.In the existing literature on structural transformation,the literature mainly focuses on labor productivity,international trade,and transportation infrastructure perspectives,exploring the main factors affecting the allocation of rural labor to the nonagricultural sector as productivity gains from technological advances in the agricultural sector.In contrast,there is less relevant micro household empirical evidence on the increase in labor demand due to the development of non-agricultural industries.This paper finds that high-speed Internet access contributes to the entry of micro and small e-commerce firms,which leads to an increase in nonfarm employment,especially increasing local nonfarm employment,which enriches the literature related to structural transformation.(2)Expanding market potential.There have been studies on e-commerce and economic growth,and there is a paucity of related mechanism studies.By constructing county market potential indicators,this paper finds that an important channel for e-commerce to promote economic growth is to expand market potential.(3)Reducing trade costs.Digital economy theory shows that digital technology development plays an important role in reducing trade costs.However,the relevant literature provides less relevant empirical evidence.This paper empirically tests the role of e-commerce service points in reducing transaction barriers and trade costs to promote farmers' consumption and provides micro-empirical evidence for e-commerce to reduce trade costs. |
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