An Empirical Study of E-commerce Promoting Rural Industrial Structure Optimization: Evidence from China

There is increasing interest in understanding how e-commerce can promote rural development in developing countries. This study uses a dynamic panel data set of 225 prefecture-level cities in China to empirically investigate the effect of e-commerce on the quality of rural economic development in developing countries. The results show that e-commerce makes a positive contribution to the optimization of rural industrial structure, especially the promotion of industrial structure supererogation, mainly by influencing the development of the tertiary industry. The effect of e-commerce on the optimization of rural industrial structure is modulated by the local economic base and time factors. Our research emphasizes the importance of e-commerce for rural development. The research results show that e-commerce can be part of an effective strategy to break the bottleneck of rural economic development and address the structural contradictions of economic development in developing countries.