Abstract:
The new era calls for a coordinated development across different regions. This is an important task for building a modern economic system and achieving high-quality economic development. The present study compares the degree of regional coordinated development in terms of inter-provincial differences and urban-rural gaps. The study gives a qualitative analysis of the digital economy’s impact on regional coordinated development from the perspective of digital economy’s driving force, and uses the panel data from 30 provinces (municipalities and autonomous regions), panel fixed model, Bootstrap test mediation effect model and panel threshold model and other econometric models for an empirical analysis. The results show that: first, the digital economy reduces inter-provincial and urban-rural gaps, and has a positive effect on promoting coordinated development across regions; second, the development of digital economy can significantly reduce the inter-provincial gap in the eastern region and the urban-rural gap in the central and western regions; third, the greater the disparity, the better the effect of the digital economy in narrowing the inter-provincial or urban-rural gap; fourth, the digital economy inhibits the coordinated regional development through industrial structure upgrading, and promotes coordinated regional development through technological innovation; fifth, the marketization of production factors presents a double-threshold effect in the process of reducing inter-provincial differences in the digital economy, and has a moderating role in the process of reducing urban-rural differences in the digital economy.