How can the Construction of E-Commerce Demonstration Cities Narrow the Income Gap Between Urban and Rural Areas?
Based on the quasi-natural experiment of national e-commerce demonstration city construction,we construct multi-period DID and PSM-DID models using panel data of 258 prefecture-level cities and Ali Taobao village data from 2010-2020 to empirically test the impact of national e-commerce demonstration city construction on the urban-rural in-come gap.The results show that the construction of demonstration cities improves the per capita disposable income of rural and urban areas by 15.1％and 8.7％,respectively,and effectively reduces the urban-rural income gap.The mechanism analysis found that the model city construction reduced the urban-rural income gap by promoting rural e-commerce devel-opment and low-and middle-skilled employment.The heterogeneity analysis concluded that the effect of model cities in narrowing the urban-rural income gap was mainly reflected in small and medium-sized cities and southern cities,and the effect on large cities and northern cities was not obvious.This study provides the following implications:increase the pilot in small and medium-sized cities to realize the pilot work down to districts and counties;improve the supporting facilities in rural areas,and northern cities should learn from the southern cities'e-commerce model to create rural'e-commerce fea-tures;organize public welfare employment skills training to enhance the employment level of farmers.
e-commerce demonstration citiesurban-rural income gapmulti-period DID
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
