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2716As digital technology reshapes agricultural production and rural governance across the Global South, understanding its distributional consequences has become an increasingly important policy and academic concern. Although digitalization has increasingly been promoted as a driver of rural revitalization, its distributional consequences at the micro level remain insufficiently explored.
Using nationally representative microdata from the 2023 “Thousand-villages Survey”, which covers 998 villages across 31 provinces, this paper investigates whether digital technology narrows the income gaps among rural households. To mitigate potential endogeneity and selection bias, it implements a multi-method identification strategy combining endogenous treatment effect models, PSM, and IVQR. The results show that digital technology significantly increases household income, with the strongest effect concentrated in the lower tail of income distribution. The marginal effect declines as income quantiles increase, indicating a robust pro-poor effect. This paper also explores two mechanisms through which digital technology mitigates inequality. First, it expands the feasible capabilities of low-income farmers by improving access to market information, sale channels, entrepreneurship opportunities, and digital finance. Second, it facilitates the convergence of capital returns, reducing income gaps caused by disparities in human, social, and physical capital. This paper contributes to the literature by providing robust micro-level evidence on the inequality-mitigating effect of rural digitalization. The conclusions have practical policy implications: Targeted digital training programs, investment in digital infrastructure, and inclusive technology promotion strategies can help ensure that the benefits from digital transformation are more equitably shared across rural society.
