in urbans but have not been transformed into citizens, which is not conducive to unleashing the consumption potential and realizing the common wealth. Therefore, China released the National New-type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020) in 2014, and set Anhui and Jiangsu provinces as the first batch of new-type urbanization pilots in 2015, aiming to exploring the reform of household registration, equalization of social security, and innovation of urban-rural factor mobility mechanism and other mechanisms for the construction of new-type urbanization. However, existing research lacks a quantitative assessment of the effects of China's new-type urbanization pilot policies, especially from the perspective of rural migrants.
This paper uses the 2015 national new-type urbanization pilot in Jiangsu and Anhui provinces as a "quasi-natural experiment" and combines data from the China Migrants Dynamic Survey (CDMS) from 2011 to 2017, to empirically investigates the policy effects of China's new-type urbanization provincial pilots from the perspective of labor mobility. It is found that after the pilot, the rural migrant in the pilot provinces significantly reduced outflow to other provinces, indicating the positive effects of new-type urbanization in the pilot areas. Mechanism analysis shows that wage income is not a motivation for individual flow shifts, but rather access to more social security and enhanced urban integration. In addition, the paper further finds that the new-type urbanization pilot not only promoted a higher probability of rural migrants staying in the urban areas of the province, but also increased family-based migration within the province, which suggests that the new-type urbanization pilot in China has played a substantial and positive role in enhancing the process of citizenship of the rural migrants.
The findings of this paper have important policy implications. First, to further reduce the migrants’ barriers of rural to urban, urban areas which absorb the inflow of the rural migrants should pay more attention to the demands of the rural migrant in terms of public services, improve the migrant's sense of identity and belonging to the inflow area, enhance their willingness to realize citizenship, and accelerate the settlement of the rural migrant in the urbans, so as to improve the new-type of urbanization. Secondly, the beneficial practices of pilot provinces of new-type urbanization should be actively utilized to systematically summarize and promote practical experience. Third, the regional scope of the new-type urbanization pilots should be further broadened to form more experiences of new-type urbanization construction according to local conditions. Currently,China's less urbanized provinces are mainly located in the western region, so it is possible to further implement pilot newtype urbanization in typical western provinces, explore more innovative initiatives conducive to the promotion of new-type urbanization, and further enrich the regional samples of China's implementation of the new-type urbanization strategy.
The report of the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China emphasizes that "Chinese-style modernization is the modernization of Common Prosperity (CP) for all people." General Secretary Xi Jinping has also stressed the necessity of "resolutely preventing polarization and promoting Common Prosperity." Against this backdrop, China's per capita disposable income has significantly increased, and the battle against poverty has achieved comprehensive victory. However,as of 2024, China's Gini coefficient is 0.465, which remains well above the international safety standard of 0.4, indicating a substantial urban-rural income gap and persistently low farmer incomes. Notably, achieving CP faces numerous challenges,particularly due to low comparative returns in agricultural production and operations, a weakening of the traditional momentum for farmers' income growth, and an urgent need to enhance farmers' endogenous development capabilities and selfdevelopment abilities. In this context, the construction of Digital Village Construction (DVC) serves as a significant strategic initiative for advancing rural digital transformation and accelerating agricultural modernization, providing a viable pathway for promoting CP.
This article outlines the impact mechanism of DVC on CP and empirically examines the effects of DVC on CP using panel data from 1, 637 counties in China from 2019 to 2020. Utilizing two-way fixed effects and moderation effect models from the perspective of external environments, such as economic vitality and economic foundation, the study reveals that DVC not only promotes CP but also exhibits a significant catch-up effect that helps narrow the CP gap between regions. Further analysis indicates that the digitalization of rural economies and rural infrastructure are the primary factors driving CP, while the digitalization of rural governance and rural living conditions have relatively minor impacts. Additionally, DVC predominantly promotes CP in major grain-producing areas and eastern regions, while its effect is relatively smaller in non-grainproducing areas as well as in central and western regions. Finally, moderation effect analysis shows that the enhancement of economic vitality significantly strengthens the promoting effect of DVC on CP, whereas improvements in economic foundations somewhat weaken this promoting effect.
The potential marginal contributions of this article are reflected in three main aspects: (1) It emphasizes that the empowerment of CP through digital technology should rely on the characteristics of practical application scenarios, making the embedded regulatory mechanisms of economic vitality and economic foundation more explicitly, which serves as a beneficial complement to research on DVC. (2) By utilizing panel data from 1, 637 counties from 2019 to 2020 and employing a two-way fixed effects model to assess the impact of DVC on CP, the study effectively mitigates the endogeneity bias caused by crosssectional data, thereby enhancing the accuracy of the estimation results. (3) The article underscores the multidimensionality of DVC, representing it from the perspectives of rural infrastructure digitization, rural economy digitization, rural governance digitization, and rural living digitization. It examines the impact characteristics on CP from both an overall perspective and four distinct perspectives, employing quantile regression models to verify the catch-up effect of DVC on CP, thereby providing theoretical foundations and more accurate practical references for improving the policy framework that empowers CP through DVC.
