The Impact of the Digital Economy on High-Quality Development: An Analysis Based on the National Big Data Comprehensive Test Area

This paper takes the establishment of the big national data comprehensive experimental area as a quasi-natural experiment, selects the balanced panel data of 31 provinces, autonomous regions, and cities (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan) in China from 2011 to 2019 as the research object, and adopts a multistage DID model to evaluate the impact of the digital economy on high-quality economic development. We found that the digital economy has a significant role in promoting high-quality economic development. The PSM-DID, placebo test, and robustness test of modified model settings also confirmed this conclusion. The heterogeneity analysis found that the digital economy significantly improved the quality of economic development in the eastern region and regions with a better institutional environment, but not in the central and western regions and regions with poor institutional environments. The mechanism test showed that the digital economy mainly improved the quality of economic development by improving regional innovation ability and stimulating residents’ consumption. The spatial spillover effect found that the digital economy also had the incentive to improve the high-quality development of neighboring regions.