| In recent years,as China has built a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way,promoting the common prosperity of all people has been placed in a more important position.The report of the 20 th CPC National Congress clearly pointed out that Chinese path to modernization is the modernization of common prosperity for all people.Common prosperity is mainly assessed through three indicators: population gap,regional gap and urban-rural gap.The urban-rural gap is an important manifestation of unbalanced and inadequate development,and narrowing the urban-rural gap is the key to achieving common prosperity.As the key five years for the start of modernization,how to adhere to the high-quality development and promote the integrated development of urban and rural areas and promote common prosperity will become a major theoretical and practical agenda during the 14 th Five Year Plan period.The current digital economy,with digital information as the key production factor,is booming,giving birth to new business models and economic paradigms,and continuously developing into an important force driving coordinated economic development.Common prosperity is embedded in the digital economy era.The increasing returns to scale and positive externality of data elements have broken the constraints of scarcity production factors and created a steady stream of power for economic growth.Therefore,both in time and in theory,the digital economy will become a strong support for orderly promoting the overall process of common prosperity.In this context,it is of great practical significance to explore the impact of the development of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap in detail and seek a feasible path for the digital economy to promote common prosperity.From the perspective of urban-rural income gap,which is a key factor affecting the overall process of common prosperity,and based on the theoretical analysis of the impact of digital economy development on urban-rural income gap,this paper uses the panel data of 229 prefecture level cities from 2011 to 2019 as experimental samples to measure the development level of the digital economy at the prefecture level city level using the entropy method,and empirically analyzes the impact of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)On the whole,the development of digital economy will significantly narrow the urban-rural income gap and promote the overall process of common prosperity in China;(2)From different aspects of the development of the digital economy,digital infrastructure construction,digital industrialization,and industrial digitization all exhibit a negative correlation with the urban-rural income gap;(3)From the perspective of impact mechanism,the digital economy mainly affects the urban-rural income gap through two paths: promoting population urbanization to increase farmers’ wage income,and improving agricultural production efficiency to increase household operating income;(4)From the perspective of regional heterogeneity,the impact of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap has regional heterogeneity,which is reflected in the fact that the digital economy significantly suppresses the urban-rural income gap in the central and western regions,while the result is not significant in the eastern regions.From the perspective of the heterogeneity of the development level of transport infrastructure,the development of the digital economy can significantly drive the convergence of the urban-rural income gap in regions with high levels of transport infrastructure construction.The above conclusions enrich and improve the research on the impact of digital economy development on urban-rural income gap,and provide theoretical support for the development of digital economy and the realization of common prosperity. |
