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.