The spatial aggregation of rural e-commerce in China: An empirical investigation into Taobao Villages

Abstract

Abstract China's rural e-commerce has been developing quickly over the last decade, and it has shown significant spatial aggregation in some areas. This paper examines this development and investigates factors that impact its spatial aggregation. The development of Taobao Villages is a typical example that reflects the fast development and spatial aggregation of rural e-commerce in villages. Thus, all the Taobao Villages that existed in China by 2017 are used as our research sample for the empirical analysis. Considering that village-level data involving long-term and large-scale observations are lacking in China, we innovatively combine report data from Alibaba, spatial data from Geography Information Systems technology, company data from web crawler technology and nighttime light data from remote sensing technology to quantify the factors of interest for each sample village. Ultimately, the consistent results of a random-effects probit model based on data about 2266 villages across six years and a negative binominal model based on cross-section data of 2092 villages demonstrates that the spatial aggregation at village-level with regard to rural e-commerce is significantly driven by the local industrial base and neighborhood effects. Interestingly, the socioeconomic conditions of the surrounding regions that villages locate in impact the spatial aggregation of rural e-commerce significantly and it presents non-linear relationship between them, but the local socioeconomic conditions of villages per se do not present significant impacts on it. This paper concludes with the policy implication for the promotion of spatial aggregation of rural e-commerce.