ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1613064
This article is part of the Research TopicHarnessing Digital Innovation for Sustainable Agricultural DevelopmentView all 36 articles
Digital Dividends in Rural China: Unraveling the Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Technological Progress-Driven Transformation
Provisionally accepted
- 1College of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, Hubei Province, China
- 2Dongshin University, Naju, Republic of Korea
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This study investigates how the digital economy drives rural revitalization in China through technological progress. Using panel data from 281 prefecture-level and above cities from 2011 to 2021, both static and dynamic models are constructed to assess the effects of digital development. Agricultural technological progress—including general progress, frontier innovation, and pure technical efficiency—is introduced as both a moderating and threshold variable. Results show that the digital economy significantly promotes rural revitalization, with clear spatial and temporal heterogeneity. Among the three types of technological progress, improvements in pure technical efficiency have the strongest enhancing effect. Moreover, threshold analyses reveal that as technical efficiency improves, the positive impact of the digital economy intensifies, whereas the effect diminishes with higher levels of general or frontier technological advancement. The findings suggest promoting digital infrastructure in rural areas, deepening the integration of agricultural technologies and digital tools, and tailoring policy interventions based on technological development stages to maximize digital dividends.
Keywords: digital economy, Rural transformation, agricultural technological progress, Moderating effect, threshold effect
Received: 16 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Luo, Xie and Xiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Zhaoyang Xiang, 805322753@qq.com
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