This study aims to reveal how e‐commerce affects the income gap between urban and rural areas in the context of developing world. An empirical examination was carried out by using the panel data of 11 cities in Zhejiang Province, China, from 2011 to 2018. The results show that there is an inverted‐U relationship between e‐commerce development and urban‐rural income gap. Zhejiang is still on the left side of the inverted‐U curve, where e‐commerce development increases the urban‐rural income gap. The government should create more favorable conditions for the popularization of rural e‐commerce and advance the turning point.

Whether farmers live happily or not matters a nation’s harmony and stability. Recently, a large number of rural e-commerce service centers (RESC) have been emerged in rural China. RESC provide some convenient services for local residents, such as agent purchase, sales, and payment online. This paper devotes to empirically analyzing the impact of RESC on farmers’ subjective well-being (SWB) with the method of propensity score matching based on the survey data collected from the first pilot city of Alibaba’s RESC project – Tonglu County, Zhejiang Province. It is confirmed that RESC can significantly improve farmers’ SWB, which not only provides an empirical evidence for the further development of RESC, but also reveals that RESC is a beneficial practice for local governments to utilize the internet to improve farmers’ welfare. It also has a positive exemplary significance for ‘internet plus rural public services’.

Health, as basic human capital, is quite important for rural adults. However, in China, the average level of public health facilities and services is far lower in rural areas than in cities. In recent years, the internet has developed rapidly in China, and is increasingly affecting rural adults in a positive way. The purpose of this paper is to reveal whether internet use can be an effective way to improve the health of rural adults. This study used three rounds of data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) collected in 2014, 2016, and 2018. After eliminating samples due to attrition, the study included 7528 villagers who were at least 16 years old. A panel logit model was employed to conduct an empirical analysis. The results indicate that internet use has a significantly positive impact on health outcomes of rural adults. By using the internet, rural adults can find a large amount of health information, increase their social interaction, and maintain physical exercise to improve their health. Thus, it is important to promote internet use for health purposes in rural areas. In addition, internet use had heterogeneous effects on the health of rural adults of different genders, age groups, and education levels. Attention should be focused on highly educated older men to improve the effects of internet use.

The idea of green economy is being taken seriously all over the world. For developing countries, the key to developing green economy is to strike a balance between environmental protection and economic development. As the largest developing country, China has been exploring scientific schemes to deal with the relationship between environmental protection and economic development. Developing rural tourism is an important way to transform ecological advantages into economic benefits. However, the role of rural tourism remains controversial. No scholars have yet provided solutions for village-level practices in developing countries from the perspective of endogenous development theory. Taking Yucun, a village in Zhejiang Province as an example, this paper reveals the endogenous way of green economy development at the village level through the method of case study. It is confirmed that the key to transforming rural ecological advantages into economic benefits is to cultivate the village’s endogenous development capacity, including activating local resources, cultivating local identity, stimulating local participation, and building a collaborative network. Only by implementing the endogenous development mode in rural areas cannot only stimulate the positive role of rural tourism and form a virtuous cycle, but also avoid the negative effects of rural tourism previously pointed out by scholars.

Innovation is an important driving force for high-quality regional economic development. In recent years, the Chinese government has actively explored new ways to improve regional innovation level, and the construction of smart cities is regarded as an important measure to implement the innovation-driven development strategy. Based on the panel data of 287 prefecture-level cities in China from 2001 to 2019, this paper examined the impact of smart city construction on regional innovation. The research shows that: (i) The construction of smart city has significantly improved the level of regional innovation; (ii) Investment in science and technology and human capital level are important transmission paths for smart city construction to affect regional innovation; (iii) Compared with the central and western regions, the impact of smart city construction on regional innovation is more obvious in the eastern region. This study deepens the understanding of smart city construction, which has important policy significance for China to accelerate the construction of an innovative country and the healthy development of smart cities, and provides reference for other developing countries to promote smart city construction.