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Can digital village policy support sustainable rural transformation? a multi-dimensional evaluation of governance; development; and environmental livability in China
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DOI：10.3389/fenvs.2026.1903560.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
Can rural digitalization simultaneously advance governance; development; and environmental livability? This study evaluates China’s Digital Village Pilot Policy (DVPP); which designated 236 pilot counties in 2020; using a difference-in-differences (DID) framework applied to city-level panel data covering 464 prefecture-level cities over 2010–2023. The primary outcome is the official Rural Revitalization Index; a composite measure encompassing environmental livability; economic development; and institutional governance. The baseline DID estimate indicates a modest positive effect on composite rural revitalization (β=0.0078; p=0.017); corresponding to approximately 2.4% of the sample mean. This result survives permutation testing (pempirical=0.000); PSM-DID (β=0.009; p=0.004); and province-specific linear trends (β=0.005; p=0.021); but becomes insignificant when the implementation date is lagged to 2021 (β=0.005; p=0.128); reflecting the difficulty of separating policy effects from pandemic-era disruptions given the COVID-19 overlap with the first treatment cohort. Decomposition analysis identifies positive and statistically significant responses across all five official first-level dimensions; with effective governance (β=0.083; p=0.004) and civilized culture (β=0.080; p=0.002) as the strongest short-run responses; followed by industrial prosperity (β=0.066; p=0.014); prosperous living (β=0.054; p=0.010); and ecological livability (β=0.047; p=0.007). Treatment-intensity heterogeneity further shows that cities with more concentrated pilot-county coverage experience larger composite effects (β=0.010; p=0.033). Complementarity analysis reveals that benefits are concentrated in cities with stronger pre-existing rural development foundations; whereas cities with weak institutional capacity experience limited or negative net effects. These findings suggest that digital village construction contributes to sustainable rural transformation through multi-dimensional gains that are strongest in governance and culture and conditional on local absorptive capacity.
Keywords:
policy evaluation
China
difference-in-differences
rural revitalization
digital village
institutional governance
environmental livability
sustainable rural transformation
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