The Road to Common Prosperity: Can the Digital Countryside Construction Increase Household Income?

Abstract

With the rapid development of China’s digital economy, promoting the digital countryside construction has become the strategic focus and priority development direction of rural revitalization and common prosperity. This paper combines the county-level digital countryside index with the data from the China Household Finance Survey to empirically analyze the impact and mechanism of the digital countryside construction on household income. The results show that the digital countryside construction can significantly improve the level of household income. After the endogenous analysis and the robustness test, this core conclusion is still valid. From the perspective of mechanism test, the digital countryside construction can increase household income by promoting household entrepreneurship and nonagricultural employment. Heterogeneity analysis shows that there is no significant difference in the income-increasing effect of the digital countryside construction, whether urban or rural households, or households with different human capital and social relations, which means that the digital countryside development has the characteristics of inclusiveness and sharing. Under the background of unswervingly taking the road of common prosperity for all Chinese people, this paper provides some micro-evidence for how the digital economy can contribute to household income growth, as well as provides a useful reference for the implementation of the digital China strategy.