数字经济、数字鸿沟与农村多维相对贫困

Digital Economy, Digital Divide and Multidimensional Relative Poverty in Rural Areas

中国扶贫治理战略已经从解决绝对贫困转化为治理相对贫困,如何在数字化时代治理相对贫困已成为新的工作重点。本文在梳理数字经济治理相对贫困文献的基础上,提出数字经济发展缓解农村多维相对贫困的作用机制,并利用2013-2020年省级平衡面板数据进行实证检验。研究发现,数字经济发展与农村多维相对贫困之间存在倒U型关系,即数字经济发展初期因数字鸿沟会扩大农村多维相对贫困,随着数字经济发展深入则会缓解农村多维相对贫困状况。中介效应检验发现,数字经济能够通过影响农村创业机会与人力资本水平来缓解农村多维相对贫困。进一步研究发现,农村互联网基础设施建设的完善和教育投入的增加都可以显著地调节数字经济发展对农村多维相对贫困的影响,缓解数字经济发展初期扩大农村多维相对贫困的负面作用。

China’s poverty alleviation governance strategy has transformed from addressing absolute poverty to governing relative poverty, and how to govern relative poverty in the digital era has become a new focus. Based on combing the literature on the digital economy to govern relative poverty, this paper proposes the mechanism of the role of digital economy development in alleviating rural multidimensional relative poverty and conducts an empirical test using provincial balanced panel data from 2013 to 2020. It is found that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between digital economy development and rural multidimensional relative poverty, i.e., digital economy development expands rural multidimensional relative poverty at the beginning due to the digital divide, and alleviates rural multidimensional relative poverty as digital economy development deepens. The intermediate effect test finds that the digital economy can alleviate rural multidimensional relative poverty by affecting rural entrepreneurial opportunities and human capital levels. Further study finds that both the improvement of rural internet infrastructure development and the increase of education investment can significantly moderate the impact of digital economy development on rural multidimensional relative poverty and mitigate the negative effect of expanding rural multidimensional relative poverty in the early stage of digital economy development.