The Influence of Digital Technology on Rural Common Prosperity and Its Spatial Spillover Effect

This paper focuses on the “information into the village and household across the province” project as a quasi-natural experiment, employing panel data from 30 provinces during the period 2011–2021. By constructing overlapping difference-in-differences (DID) models, mediating models, and SEM-DID models, we explored how digital technology affects the level of rural common prosperity and its mechanisms. Subsequently, utilizing the China General Social Survey (CGSS) micro database, we assessed the impact of digital technology on the subjective well-being of rural residents from a micro perspective through an ordered logit model. The findings suggest that (1) digital technology can enhance the level of common prosperity in rural areas, and this promotional effect is achieved via three main pathways: empowering rural ecological environment construction, improving agricultural production efficiency, and fostering rural e-commerce, (2) spatial spillover effect tests reveal that digital technology has a spatial spillover effect on the level of common prosperity in neighboring provinces and cities’ rural areas, with this effect exhibiting spatial decay boundaries, and (3) micro data tests indicate that the utilization of digital technology significantly increases the subjective well-being of rural residents.