FinTech adoption and the clustered development of rural e-commerce: Evidence from Taobao Village

Abstract

This article uses county-level, township-level, and village-level panel data covering the entire country to prove the role of FinTech adoption in promoting the development of rural e-commerce. At the same time, we use the distance to the nearest Guan Temple to the village as an instrumental variable to further prove the positive role of FinTech adoption while excluding endogeneity. The clustered development model of rural e-commerce found in selected provinces in the literature has also been proven by us at the national level. At the same time, we found that the aggregation effect inter-county, intra-county, and intra-town has gradually increased, which also helps us make a reasonable explanation on the role of FinTech. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to study the role of FinTech adoption on rural e-commerce. Utilizing satellite data combined with statistics from the bureau, we constructed an annual urban-rural classification index with a square kilometer precision covering the entire country.