| The digital economy has become a new engine of the high-quality development of China's economy, and the sharing of its development achievements is also expected to an effective means to solve the economic inequality of the urban and rural areas. As the foundation of digital economy, digital infrastructure is of great importance. Could the digital infrastructure construction narrow the urban-rural income gap? Based on the panel data of prefecture-level cities and six rounds of CFPS survey data from 2010 to 2020, this paper takes the "Broadband China" policy as a proxy variable for digital infrastructure construction, and employs the staggered DID model to study the impact of digital infrastructure construction on the urban-rural income gap and its mechanisms. This paper finds that during the period of rapid development of digital economy, digital infrastructure construction expands the urban-rural income gap, and the conclusion is robustness after considering the endogeneity and various robustness tests. The mechanism analysis shows that, at the macro level, digital infrastructure construction effectively improves the level of urban innovation and industrial intelligence, which gives urban areas a stronger development momentum compared with rural areas. Furthermore, at the micro level, compared with rural residents, digital infrastructure construction can more effectively improve the non-agricultural employment participation rate of urban residents and the frequency of using the Internet to learn and work, which can help urban residents accumulate more human capital related to digital skills. The research conclusions of this paper provide evidences for the direction of the policy formulation to promote the balance development of urban and rural areas with the development of digital economy, that is, improve the level of rural information service, agricultural production efficiency, rural residents' digital literacy and promote equal quality of digital services in urban and rural areas on the basis of bridging the digital infrastructure gap between the urban and rural areas. |
