Abstract The digital economy (DE) provides new paths for driving urban-rural integrated development (URID). Based on the panel data of 210 cities within the 19 city clusters in China from 2012 to 2023, this paper explores the impact of DE on URID The results indicate that the DE has a non-linear effect on URID, with an inverted U-shaped characteristic, the DE effectively promotes URID in its initial stage of development, but with the further development, the digital divide between urban and rural areas will become more pronounced, which is not conducive to URID. From the perspective of heterogeneity analysis, the DE has different impacts on URID in regions with different geographical locations, development-level classification, and economic development status. In eastern and western regions of China, as well as in city clusters in the optimizing stage, there exists a statistically significant inverted U-shaped relationship between DE and URID. Mechanism analysis shows that industrial structure and innovation capacity play intermediary roles in the process of DE affecting URID, and fiscal support for agriculture can significantly regulate the inverted U-shaped relationship between DE and URID. Additionally, the inverted U-shaped impact of DE on URID exhibits a notable spatial spillover effect.
Jia et al. (Thu,) studied this question.