Against the backdrop of China's economic transition from high-speed growth to high-quality development, the digital economy has emerged as a core driver of regional development. Although existing studies have investigated the factors influencing the "high-quality" development of the digital economy at the provincial level, they have failed to systematically identify the internal driving factors within developed provinces. Taking Jiangsu Province as a case study, this paper designs an evaluation index system and employs the Entropy Weight Method and Principal Component Analysis to examine the driving factors and evolutionary characteristics of high-quality digital economy development in Jiangsu from 2014 to 2023. The findings reveal that: (1) the comprehensive development level of Jiangsu's digital economy remained largely stable after peaking in 2017, exhibiting an overall upward trend when excluding the impact of the pandemic; (2) innovation capacity and green development are the primary driving forces behind the high-quality development of Jiangsu's digital economy, while the contribution of the high-tech foundation of the digital industry remains relatively low and requires further improvement. The theoretical contributions of this paper are twofold: first, it operationalizes the concept of "high-quality development" into a multi-dimensional evaluation index system, enriching the methodological approaches to digital economy research; second, based on principal component analysis, it identifies the core driving factors and their contribution structure for high-quality digital economy development in a developed province, providing an empirical basis for targeted policy formulation. The study recommends that Jiangsu further strengthen the integrated development of high-tech industries and the digital economy, fully leverage the complementary regional advantages of Southern, Central, and Northern Jiangsu, and promote coordinated development of the digital economy across the province.
Chen et al. (Wed,) studied this question.