Digital Economy Drives High-quality Economic Development: Efficiency Improvement and Consumption Promotion

Yang Wenpu

Journal of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics Vol. 24, Issue 01, pp. 48 - 60 (2022)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.jsufe.2022.01.004

Summary

At present, China’s digital economy is booming and has become a new driving force and engine to promote high-quality economic development. This paper constructs the development indicators of digital economy in China’s provinces, and empirically studies the influence and mechanism of digital economy on high-quality development. The results show that: First of all, digital economy helps to promote high-quality development, which is still valid after endogenous problem processing and robustness test. Secondly, the mediating effect test shows that digital economy can drive high-quality development by promoting the consumption level, but the mediating effect of consumption structure upgrading is not significant. Finally, the paper measures the production efficiency of China’s three industries, and tests the intermediary effect of the production efficiency of the three industries. The results show that digital economy can drive high-quality development by promoting the production efficiency of the secondary industry and the tertiary industry, and the intermediary effect of the production efficiency of the tertiary industry is relatively greater. However, the intermediary effect of the production efficiency of the primary industry is not significant. Therefore, grasping the strategic opportunity of digital economy, strengthening the integration of digital economy and traditional industries, and speeding up the transformation of digital consumption are conducive to promoting the high-quality development of China’s economy.

Keywords

digital economy; high-quality development; production efficiency; consumption promotion