Strengthening the construction of digital government,transforming government func-tions and enhancing government governance capacity have become the development strategies of major countries around the world.This article focuses on whether digital government can be a powerful tool for improving social equity and reducing income disparity,and empirically analyzes the relationship between digital government and income disparity based on the data of 955 cross-country samples over a nine-year sample period from the United Nations E-Government Survey.The findings show that strengthening digital government can signifi-cantly reduce cross-country income disparities,a result that is robust to both the replacement variable measure and the econometric model.The government reduces institutional distance and thus income dis-parity through digital governance.Further research finds that digital government will drive the relation-ship between economic growth and income inequality from an inverted U-shaped Kuznets curve to a nega-tive correlation,implying that digital government will accelerate the inflection point of the Kuznets curve,which not only reduces cross-country income disparities,but also mitigates income inequality within countries.
Digital governmentInstitutional distanceIncome disparityKuznets curve
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