Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications

Ruize Gao , Liyan Han , Zhen Li , Fei Long , Dongbo Shi , Ke Tang , Qi Zhang

Jin Liu

Friday, August 29, 2025 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM

A3-2-303

Zoom 435 529 7909 (BIMSA)

Improving the income of rural residents is an inevitable requirement for achieving all-around rural revitalization, as well as an inevitable choice for expanding domestic demand and realizing domestic and international dual circulation. In this process, the government plays an important role. This paper takes the government data open platforms in Chinese cities as a quasi natural experiment, using the staggered DID method and panel data from 2003 counties in China from 2000 to 2022 to evaluate the impact of government data open platform construction on rural residents' income. The result shows that public data openness has a significant income increasing effect on rural residents. Mechanism analysis shows that the construction of government data open platforms can increase rural residents' income by encouraging agricultural entrepreneurship and innovation and promoting financial development. In heterogeneity analysis, the findings show that public data openness has the most significant effect on improving the income of rural residents in the eastern region, but has no significant impact on the income of rural residents in the western region. Public data openness has a significant effect on improving the income of rural residents in areas with low government service efficiency, but has no significant impact on the income of rural residents in areas with high government service efficiency. The further analysis shows that although public data openness can simultaneously increase the income of urban and rural residents, it has a greater impact on the income of urban residents, leading to a widening absolute income gap between urban and rural residents. After examining different levels of data openness, we finds that in counties under prefecture level cities that simultaneously open data from both prefecture level cities and districts, the effect of data openness on rural residents' income is greater than in counties under prefecture level cities that only open data from prefecture level cities. In addition, this paper also conducts a case study on data openness in prefecture level cities of Shandong Province, crawling 71990 open datasets from 16 prefecture level cities to explore the micro mechanism of the impact of public data openness on rural residents' income. Based on the above analysis, this paper proposes policy recommendations to further enhance the public service attributes of data openness, improve platform usability, and increase the development and utilization of public open data resources, in order to narrow the "digital divide" and further unleash the dividends of public data.