Rural E-Commerce and rural revitalization: the income channel and the complementary role of FinTech

Against the strategic imperative of rural revitalization in China, this study examines how rural e-commerce contributes to rural revitalization and whether financial technology (FinTech) strengthens this relationship. Baseline regressions show a significant positive association between rural e-commerce and rural revitalization, and the result remains robust to an alternative measure of rural e-commerce, clustered standard errors, a restricted sample, and an instrumental-variable approach. Mechanism analysis shows that rural e-commerce significantly increases household income, supporting the proposed income channel. FinTech also strengthens the positive association between e-commerce and rural revitalization: the interaction terms for overall FinTech development, coverage breadth, usage depth, and digitalization are positive and statistically significant. Heterogeneity analysis further shows that the e-commerce coefficient is statistically significant in villages with larger household bases, greater land area, and larger labour forces. These findings provide empirical evidence on the complementarity between digital commerce and financial services in rural development and offer policy implications for inclusive, digitally enabled rural revitalization.