The impact of rural e-commerce platforms on the transformation of industrial structure: Evidence from China

The rapid development of rural e-commerce in China has caught the attention of economists around the world. Through incorporating rural e-commerce platform into the general equilibrium model, this paper theoretically analyzes the impacts of rural e-commerce platform on industrial structure and the potential mechanisms. Then, taking the exogenous policy of Comprehensive Demonstration of National E-commerce into Rural Areas in China as a quasi-experiment, this paper constructs a staggered difference-in-differences model to empirically examine how rural e-commerce platforms affect the output proportion of nonagricultural sector with samples of 2305 counties in China from 2009 to 2019. The findings indicate that the construction of rural e-commerce platform promotes the transformation of industrial structure through technological advances and reduction of transaction costs.