1. Introduction
In today’s world, the new generation of information technology is deeply integrated with the real economy. It has gradually become a global consensus to develop the digital economy, promote economic and social transformation, and cultivate new drivers of economic growth. With the vigorous development of digital economy, new products, new forms of business, new occupations, and new models continue to emerge and show strong resilience and vitality [
1]. According to the
China Digital Economy Development Report (
2022) released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), new breakthroughs were made in the development of China’s digital economy in 2021, with the scale of digital economy reaching 45.5 trillion CNY, more than double that of 2016, accounting for 39.8% of the GDP, an increase of 9.6 percentage points compared with 2016 [
2]. There is no doubt that the digital economy is playing a more stable and supportive role in the national economy. In particular, China’s deployment to achieve common prosperity coincides highly with the rapid development of the digital economy, the development of which is also a viable path to achieve common prosperity. In this process, the spillover, synergistic, and inclusive effects caused by the digital economy have provided a sharing mechanism for balanced development and promoted the whole society to share the dividends of the digital economy. The Sixth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee reiterated the need to “strengthen the real economy and develop the digital economy” and “unswervingly follow the path of common prosperity for all people” [
3]. Therefore, under China’s grand blueprint of actively promoting rural revitalization and common prosperity, as well as building a well-off society in an all-round way, it is of great significance to explore the effects and mechanisms of enabling households to increase income through the development of the digital economy.
As a hot topic in academia, some scholars have explored the role of the digital economy in increasing income at a micro level. For example, Zhang et al. [
4] combined the digital financial inclusion index at the urban level with the data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and concluded that the development of digital finance only increased rural household income by promoting rural household entrepreneurship, but had no significant impact on urban household entrepreneurship and income growth. He and Song [
5,
6] also used this data to confirm that the development of digital finance can promote non-agricultural employment, but did not reflect the effect of income growth. Ma and Hu [
7] found that digital financial inclusion can promote labor mobility through the income effect and employment effect. In addition, some scholars have focused on “e-commerce”, a development perspective of the digital economy, confirming that the development of e-commerce is conducive to the increase in farmers’ income [
8,
9,
10,
11]. For example, Qiu and Zhou [
9] combined China’s e-commerce development index at the provincial level with CFPS data to prove that e-commerce is conducive to rural households’ income from the perspective of demand and supply, and that families with a high level of education will benefit more. Qin et al. [
10] also drew a similar conclusion using rural e-commerce data, but their heterogeneity analysis showed that there was no significant difference in the effect of e-commerce development on households with different education levels. However, Couture et al. [
12], based on the first e-commerce expansion plan in China, concluded that e-commerce did not increase rural household income by combining a randomized controlled trial with micro-survey data. In summary, most of the existing studies have affirmed the positive role of the digital economy in economic and social development, but there are still differences and unreasonable conclusions on promoting income growth; the data used are also not micro enough, and the problem of homogeneity is prominent.
As a part of the digital economy, the digital countryside is a new form of innovative development that relies on emerging information technologies such as the Internet, cloud computing, big data, and artificial intelligence to promote the comprehensive and deep integration of digitalization and agriculture, rural areas, and farmers’ production and life, and to boost rural revitalization with the digital transformation of rural economy and society. In view of this, the Chinese government has introduced a series of policies to facilitate the digital countryside construction. For example, in January 2018, the CPC Central Committee and the State Council issued the
Opinions on Implementing the Rural Revitalization Strategy, which explicitly proposed the implementation of the digital countryside strategy for the first time [
13]. In 2019, the General Office of the Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued the
Outline of Digital Countryside Development Strategy, which put forward new requirements for exerting the diffusion effect of information technology innovation, the spillover effect of information and knowledge, and the inclusive effect of digital technology release [
14]. In the same year, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and the Office of the Central Network Security and Information Commission issued the
Digital Agriculture Rural Development Plan (
2019–2025) [
15]. In January 2022, 10 departments, including the Cyberspace Administration of China and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, jointly issued the
Action Plan for Digital Countryside Development (
2022–2025), which emphasizes the need to liberate and develop digital productivity and constantly stimulate the endogenous driving force of rural revitalization [
16]. In summary, these policies have made it clear that empowering rural development with digital technology is an important part of building digital China, realizing rural revitalization and common prosperity. In fact, in addition to China, other countries have emphasized the importance of the digital countryside construction [
17] and introduced relevant policies to support information and communication technology to promote agricultural and rural development [
18].
With the accelerated embedding of digital technologies into many fields of rural production and life, the digital countryside construction has gradually gained the attention of scholars. Given the dual attributes of the relative importance and novelty of the digital countryside, and limited by the availability of data, the existing studies have mostly explored the impact of digital countryside construction from the theoretical level [
17,
18,
19], while few scholars have conducted systematic empirical analysis from the county level, which is the main battlefield of the digital countryside construction. In particular, taking the county as the basic unit to promote the digital countryside construction not only has the overall advantages of economic, political, cultural, social, and ecological integration, but also has the convenient advantages of directly reaching the grassroots level and efficiently obtaining detailed and comprehensive information. In addition, the
Key Tasks of New Urbanization and Urban–Rural Integration Development in 2022 issued by the National Development and Reform Commission and the
Opinions on Promoting Urbanization Construction with County as an Important Carrier issued by the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council both stressed the importance of rural revitalization with county as the strategic subject [
20,
21].
Under the background of vigorously promoting the construction of digital China, can the digital economy represented by the digital countryside construction at the county level promote an increase in household income? If there is a causal relationship, what is the mechanism? In addition, is the digital countryside construction inclusive? Will it contribute to rural revitalization? Clarifying the above issues not only helps to deeply understand the internal relationship between the digital economy and household income increase, but also has important theoretical value and practical significance for exploring the social benefits brought by the digital economy. Compared with the existing literature, this study has the following contributions: first, unlike the previous research perspectives at the provincial or urban level, this paper makes a new interpretation of the income-increasing effect of digital economy development at the county level. Second, in terms of data use, this paper, for the first time, combines the county-level digital countryside index jointly released by the Institute for New Rural Development of Peking University and the Ali Research Institute with the sample data of the China Household Finance Survey to investigate the impact of the digital countryside construction on household income from the micro level. Third, this paper not only explores the micro-mechanism of the digital countryside construction to increase household income, but also analyzes the heterogeneous effect of income-increasing effect from the perspective of inclusive sharing. This not only enriches the research on digital economy, but also helps to further explore the value and potential of digital economy in the process of promoting common prosperity. Moreover, it also has important strategic significance for promoting the high-quality development of the digital economy, consolidating the foundation of an all-round well-off society and realizing the common prosperity of all the people.
2. Theoretical Analysis and Research Hypothesis
The
G20 Digital Economy Development and Cooperation Initiative adopted at the G20 Hangzhou Summit and the
White Paper on the Development of China’s Digital Economy (
2017) released by the CAICT pointed out that the digital economy is a new economic form that uses digital knowledge and information as the key production factors, digital technology innovation as the core driver, and modern information networks as an important carrier to continuously improve the digitalization and intelligence of traditional industries through the deep integration of digital technology and the real economy, and to accelerate the restructuring of economic development and government governance models [
22,
23]. In addition, the
Digital Economy Report 2019 issued by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development emphasized that the digital economy mainly includes digital industrialization and industrial digitalization [
24]. The former is the basic part of the digital economy, namely, the information industry, including the electronic information manufacturing industry, communication industry, and software service industry. The latter is called the integration part of the digital economy, i.e., the process of digital upgrading, transforming, and reengineering of the upstream and downstream industrial chain, which mainly involves the improvement of production efficiency brought by the application of digital technology in traditional industries. In fact, the relevant research on the digital economy has also focused on whether and how digital technology can affect economic activities. Goldfarb and Tucker [
25] pointed out in their review that digital technology can reduce five different economic costs related to digital economic activities: search cost, replication cost, transportation cost, tracking cost, and verification cost. On the one hand, digital technology itself has the characteristics of repeated calls and queries at low cost. In the era of the digital economy, with the decline in search costs, the breadth and depth of search have been increasing. On the other hand, with the help of information and communication technology, digital information transmission makes the transportation cost close to zero. In addition, compared with traditional industries, the new model derived from the development of the digital economy makes goods and services easier to produce, track, and verify, which also helps to reduce the corresponding costs. Specifically, in this paper, a higher level of development of digital countryside in a region results in a lower cost of information acquisition and job search, a lower cost of commodity transportation and tracking, and a lower cost of product replication and production for the residents of that region, which will help to improve the probability of entrepreneurship and nonagricultural employment of family members in the region, thus helping to achieve household income growth.
For entrepreneurs, capturing business opportunities, conducting business, and developing markets are inseparable from the role of information [
26]. Digital countryside construction reduces the search cost of entrepreneurial information, provides more learning and entrepreneurial opportunities, broadens the information channels of entrepreneurship, and enriches entrepreneurial resources, thus improving the activity of entrepreneurship and the probability of entrepreneurial success. Specifically, residents can not only understand the trend of economic development and identify entrepreneurial opportunities through the Internet, but also make full use of the huge Internet online learning platform to reduce the cost of obtaining educational resources, optimize entrepreneurial learning methods, and improve the level of human capital [
27]. This will not only help residents to carry out entrepreneurial learning [
28], but also effectively improve individual entrepreneurial ability and ultimately contribute to the growth of family productivity [
29]. At the same time, mobile Internet technology reduces the communication cost between residents and improves the convenience and effectiveness of communication, which not only strengthens the original social relations, but also helps to develop new social networks, thus helping to increase the social capital of entrepreneurs [
30]. Social capital can indirectly bring material capital, experience, technology, and emotional support to entrepreneurs, and can improve their risk-taking ability. These resources are equally important for family entrepreneurship [
31,
32]. In addition, with the development of logistics network and sales network, as well as the decline in transportation and tracking costs, the opportunities for residents to open offline retail stores and online stores have increased significantly [
33], and households can increase their income by selling industrial products and regional characteristic products. Lastly, as an important part of the digital countryside construction, digital financial inclusion helps to realize the rational allocation of resources, broaden and improve the scope and penetration of financial services, and ease the credit constraints of potential entrepreneurs, thus contributing to family entrepreneurship and inclusive growth [
4,
34].
The development of the digital economy has optimized the business environment and enhanced the vitality of regional entrepreneurship, which has not only generated the demand for jobs and expanded the scale of employment, but also reduced the cost of nonagricultural employment. Specifically, the massive application of digital technology has improved the efficiency of production and capital accumulation, helped to expand the scale of production, and brought about the increase of employment [
35]. In addition, the digital countryside construction can promote the extension of the industrial chain, thus deriving new industries, new business models, and flexible employment needs, as well as creating more nonagricultural employment opportunities. This, to some extent, has alleviated the problem of job losses in traditional economic fields caused by factors such as industrial restructuring, capacity clearance, and market competition, and a large number of people who were forced to lose their jobs due to the substitution effect of new technologies were reabsorbed by the new industry [
36]. For example, the development of e-commerce has driven the development of subsectors such as logistics, warehousing, and packaging, increased employment demand, and promoted the transfer of agricultural surplus labor to nonagricultural employment [
37], thus increasing household income. At the same time, the rapid development of the platform economy has also provided low-skilled workers with new service jobs such as takeaway riders and online taxi drivers. According to the
Research Report on Digital Economy and Chinese Women’s Employment and Entrepreneurship in 2021, the digital economy has lowered barriers to employment and entrepreneurship for female workers in rural and remote areas, created 57 million jobs for women in fields such as digital trade, e-commerce, and live broadcasting, and expanded the value of women in the labor market [
38]. In addition, the Internet platform provides a large amount of employment information, which helps job seekers to obtain job information at a lower cost and have more employment options and opportunities [
39]. Similarly, in the era of digital economy, the use of the Internet also helps to reduce the search and communication costs of jobs, thus improving the matching efficiency of labor and jobs, as well as reducing frictional unemployment [
40].
On the basis of the above analysis, this paper proposes the following two hypotheses:
Hypothesis 1. The digital countryside construction is conducive to increasing household income.
Hypothesis 2. The digital countryside construction can increase household income by promoting household entrepreneurship and nonagricultural employment.
At present, although the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development between urban and rural areas in China is still prominent, the policy of urban–rural integration and coordinated development has been implemented continuously. In addition, human capital and social capital have been proven to affect household income [
4,
9,
10,
41]. Under the background of the inherent requirements of achieving common prosperity and the widespread popularization and application of digital technology, can the digital economy “share the cake” while “making the cake bigger”? Does the digital economy really have the characteristics of inclusiveness and sharing? Does it help to promote “sharing of wealth” between urban and rural areas and households with different types of human and social capital? Relevant theoretical research points out that the digital economy has obvious inclusive and spillover effects. It not only cultivates a large number of small and medium-sized enterprises and solves the threshold problem for small and micro-enterprises to enter the market, but also provides development opportunities for remote, poor, and underdeveloped areas, and it allows low-skilled workers, social vulnerable groups, and other market entities to have equal access to technology and services, participate in economic activities fairly, and share the development dividend of the digital economy, thus contributing to balanced growth [
42,
43,
44]. However, the results of existing empirical studies are controversial. For example, Zhang et al. [
4] pointed out that digital financial inclusion only significantly improved the income level of rural households. Cui et al. [
45] believed that e-commerce development has a stronger role in increasing income for families with high education level. Zeng et al. [
41] showed that a richer social capital leads to a greater income-increasing effect caused by e-commerce, but Qin et al. [
10] believed that the income-increasing effect of e-commerce development does not differ between different social relations. It can be seen that the existing conclusions are not consistent, and they cannot fully reflect the advantages of inclusive sharing of the digital economy. Therefore, in order to demonstrate this problem, this paper analyzes the income-increasing effect of different households from a new perspective of county-level digital countryside construction. On this basis, this paper proposes the third research hypothesis:
Hypothesis 3. The digital countryside construction has the characteristics of inclusiveness and sharing. Urban and rural households, as well as households with different human and social capital, can all achieve “sharing of wealth”.
5. Conclusions and Discussion
5.1. Conclusions
With the advancement of the fourth scientific and technological revolution marked by cloud computing, Internet, and artificial intelligence, the real economy has continued to expand using digital technology, economic costs have been significantly reduced, production efficiency has been significantly improved, and the form of industrial organization has been constantly reshaped. As a new economic form, the digital economy is becoming an important driving force to promote quality change, efficiency change, and power change in economic development. Taking the digital countryside construction as the support for rural revitalization and using the digital economy as a new engine for high-quality development in counties is of great significance for achieving an overall well-off society and common prosperity.
This paper combined the county-level digital countryside index released by the Institute for New Rural Development of Peking University and the Ali Research Institute with the CHFS data, and used the data of the China County Statistical Yearbook, based on the IV method and the mediating effect model, to explore the effect and mechanism of the digital countryside construction on household income. The results are as follows: first, the digital countryside construction significantly increases household income, and this core conclusion is still valid after endogenous and multiple robustness tests. Second, the mechanism test found that the digital countryside construction can promote household income by improving the probability of household entrepreneurship and increasing the number of nonagricultural employment of households. Third, the heterogeneity analysis pointed out that the digital countryside construction is not only conducive to the “sharing of wealth” between urban and rural households, but also has no significant difference in the income-increasing effect of households with different human capital and social capital, which reflects the inclusive and shared characteristics of the development of digital countryside to some extent.
5.2. Policy Implications
Firstly, local governments and relevant departments should actively promote the implementation of the Action Plan for Digital Countryside Development (2022–2025), constantly improve the system and mechanism design of county-level digital countryside construction from the aspects of government functions, market role, investment mechanism, incentive mechanism, assessment and evaluation mechanism, etc., issue special support plans, fully mobilize the strength of multiple social entities, and build a digital countryside development model of co-construction, co-governance, and sharing of multiple entities, thus improving the development speed of county-level digital countryside.
Secondly, while constantly improving the construction of countryside economic digitalization, countryside governance digitalization, and countryside life digitalization, attention should also be paid to improving the level of countryside digital infrastructure, such as broadening the coverage of information and financial infrastructure, and actively promoting the construction of data centers and service platforms, which will help to make up for the shortcomings of income-increasing effect of county-level digital countryside and realize the coordinated development of different fields of digital countryside.
Thirdly, in order to better realize the strategic goal of rural revitalization, rural and poverty-stricken areas need to make full use of the dividends brought about by the development of digital countryside. The government departments should also adopt more inclusive and equitable development strategies, increase the policy preference for the integration and development of digital technology and rural advantageous industries in such areas, promote the cross-regional and cross-urban–rural flow of data elements, human resources, capital, and technology, and expand the radiation-driven and spatial spillover effect of digital countryside construction, which will help to narrow the urban–rural income gap and achieve common prosperity.
Lastly, affected by the epidemic and other factors, local governments should strengthen the entrepreneurship assistance for vulnerable groups, implement the fiscal and tax preferential policies for small and micro-enterprises, and further give full play to the inclusive and shared characteristics of the digital economy. In addition, the employment and entrepreneurship promotion mechanism of digital countryside construction should be flexibly used to actively and reasonably guide the surplus labor force to engage in new forms of digital economy, such as e-commerce live broadcasting, logistics, and warehousing, so that more practitioners can make use of the dividend of digital economy to increase household income.
5.3. Limitations and Prospects
Of course, the analysis of this paper still had some limitations, which need to be further improved and expanded. Firstly, due to the limitation of the data, this study only used the cross-section data for analysis, which would have affected the accuracy of the results to some extent. However, as relevant data are updated, richer studies based on more detailed data can be conducted in the future. Secondly, this paper only explored the income-increasing effect of digital countryside construction from the perspective of common prosperity. In fact, common prosperity includes not only income, but also other aspects. In the future, we can try to build a comprehensive index of common prosperity, which will help to explore the huge dividends of the development of digital economy in a more comprehensive way. Lastly, this study can be further deepened. For example, mathematical models can be built to deeply analyze the role of digital countryside construction in increasing household income, and we can also further analyze how digital countryside construction affects household economic behaviors such as consumption and savings decision-making, employment choice, and household division of labor.