To shed light on the sustainable development of rural areas, we study the determinants of transitions from subsistence farming into either formal agricultural employment or agricultural entrepreneurship based on a recent nationally representative survey dataset. We pay particular attention to the roles of different capital endowments broadly including human, financial, natural, social and political capital. Our results show that human, natural, social and political capital are all important determinants of rural households’ transitions to on-farm employment and entrepreneurship while financial capital plays a limited role. These findings are robust to fully controlling for off-farm transitions as part of the household occupational strategy.

This paper aims to study the intricate interplay among the digital economy, industrial structure, and the degree of dependence on foreign trade. We utilize panel data from 284 prefecture-level cities in China spanning from 2011 to 2019 to comprehensively evaluate the level of digital economy development and investigate its influence on regional trade dependence. Additionally, we explore the role played by the industrial structure in the mechanism analysis. Our findings reveal that the digital economy significantly reduces regional trade dependence, while industrial structure upgrading notably enhances regional trade dependence. Moreover, the industrial structure upgrading weakens the influence of the digital economy on regional trade dependence, but such impact varies across regions as the impact of digital economy on foreign trade dependence is more pronounced in inland areas. This paper also facilitates the exploration of how the digital economy empowers domestic economic growth.