Abstract We study China’s Rural E-Commerce Development program, a large-scale digital infrastructure initiative, to assess its labor market and household impacts. Exploiting county-level rollout variation and panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (2012-2020), we find that the program raised female labor force participation by 3 percentage points and weekly hours by 2.5, with no comparable effects for men. It also promoted women’s entrepreneurship, enhanced intra-household bargaining power, and improved daughters’ education and health. A cost-benefit analysis indicates income gains far exceed program costs, underscoring digital infrastructure’s potential to foster gender equity and intergenerational human capital in rural China.
Cao et al. (Tue,) studied this question.