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.