Studying whether the digital economy effectively promotes China’s common prosperity based on the spatial Durbin model

Common prosperity is the essential aspiration of all the Chinese people, and China’s entry into a period of common prosperity coincides with the era of the digital economy. This paper analyzes the impact of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap from two dimensions industrial digitization and digital industrialization. Based on China’s provincial panel data from 2013 to 2020, the spatial autocorrelation of various indicators in the digital economy is tested employing the global Moran index and local Moran scatter plot. This paper studies whether the digital economy directly affects the income gap between urban and rural areas by constructing a spatial Durbin model with a geographical inverse distance square matrix and whether there is a spatial spillover effect on the income gap between urban and rural areas, to explore how to solve the existing problems in the income gap between urban and rural areas in China through the perspective of digital economy development. The results show that the digital economy in China has a positive spatial autocorrelation to the urban-rural income gap; The impact of the development of the digital economy on the urban-rural income gap is not only reflected in the narrowing of the local region but also through the spatial spillover effect to narrow the income gap in the surrounding region. Digital industrialization has a significant role in narrowing the urban-rural income gap with both direct and indirect effects. Based on the empirical results obtained, this paper proposes that to adjust the imbalance in the development of the digital economy in different regions, digital industrialization and industrial digitalization should be further promoted, and the balanced development of the digital economy should be correctly guided through policy means, to play the regulating role of the digital economy in narrowing the urban-rural income gap.