Digital Economy and Income Gap:From the Perspective of Core Industries in the Digital Economy
In recent years,the digital economy has flourished and become a driving force for high-quality economic de-velopment.At the same time,common prosperity is an essential requirement of socialism,and fair income distribution is an inherent part of common prosperity.From a temporal perspective,China's entry into the era of common prosperity coin-cides with the rapid development of the digital economy,and promoting common prosperity relies on the development of the digital economy.Income distribution,as the core of promoting common prosperity,should be addressed.At present,the problem of imbalanced and insufficient development in China is still prominent,with significant disparities between ur-ban and rural areas,regional development,and income distribution.The new round of technological revolution and indus-trial transformation has effectively promoted economic development,but it has also had a profound impact on income dis-tribution.The income distribution structure and income gap have brought certain difficulties and challenges to the achieve-ment of common prosperity.How to handle income distribution issues well in the context of the rapid development of the digital economy has become an important issue in promoting high-quality development and common prosperity.Based on the above background,this paper first constructs a theoretical model of the impact of the digital economy on income inequality.Based on theoretical analysis,combined with tens of millions of business registration information of enterprises and statistical data from counties and cities,and from the perspective of the core industries of the digital economy,this paper takes 2011-2020 as the research period and regional income inequality as the research object,quanti-tatively analyzes the impact of the digital economy on income inequality from the regional and urban-rural levels.Re-search has found that from 2011 to 2020,the development level of China's digital economy has been increasing year by year.During the research period,the digital economy has significantly expanded the income gap between regions and be-tween urban and rural areas.This is mainly because,firstly,the digital economy has improved labor productivity,but there are differentiated impacts in different industries.Secondly,the digital economy has caused an uneven distribution of human capital and has not yet shown the characteristics of optimizing the distribution structure of human capital,espe-cially for urban residents.The differences in labor productivity among industries and unequal distribution of human capi-tal have led to the widening of the income gap between regions and urban-rural areas.In addition,the digital divide,espe-cially the digital literacy divide,will exacerbate the impact of the digital economy on regional income disparities,while the use of digital resources will weaken the widening effect of the digital economy on urban-rural income disparities.The contribution of this paper is as follows.Firstly,from the perspective of the digital economy driving differenti-ated competition among enterprises,a game model is constructed to theoretically deduce the impact of the digital economy on income inequality.In terms of the current proportion of China's digital economy in GDP,China should pay high attention to the possible widening effect of the digital economy on income inequality.Secondly,most existing re-search measures the digital economy based on the digital economy indicator system.This paper establishes a matching table between the core industries of the digital economy and the industries of the national economy based on the Statisti-cal Classification of the Digital Economy and Its Core Industries(2021)and Industrial Classification for National Eco-nomic Activities(2017)(GB/T 4754-2017).Combined with business registration information of enterprises,the core in-dustries of the digital economy are screened based on their business scopes,and the digital economy is accurately mea-sured from a micro perspective.Thirdly,most existing research has focused on exploring the impact of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap at the macro level.Starting from both regional and urban-rural levels,this paper empirically studies the impact of the digital economy on the income gap between regions and urban-rural areas,explores the mechanism of action of labor productivity and human capital distribution structure,and analyzes the regulatory role of the digital divide and the use of digital resources in it.This paper enriches relevant research in the field of the digital economy and income distribution and provides references for government decision-making.
Digital EconomyCommon ProsperityIncome DistributionIncome Gap
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
