E-commerce and rural women entrepreneurship ——Based on the quasi-natural experiment of “comprehensive demonstration policy” for E-commerce in rural areas

The importance of information and communication technology in rural areas has gradually become prominent, and rural e-commerce has emerged as a crucial driver for promoting agricultural and rural development. This paper takes the comprehensive demonstration policy for e-commerce in rural areas as a quasi-natural experiment. It is based on five-period panel data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) and employs the staggered difference-in-differences method to examine the impact of e-commerce on rural women entrepreneurship and its mechanisms. The research results indicate that the implementation of the comprehensive demonstration policy for e-commerce in rural areas significantly increases the probability of rural women engaging in entrepreneurship by 1.6 %. The entrepreneurial promotion effect of this demonstration policy is more pronounced for rural women in the central and western regions and those with lower educational levels, demonstrating the inclusiveness of e-commerce in rural development. Additionally, this promotion effect is also significantly influenced by marital heterogeneity. Mechanism analysis results suggest that the comprehensive demonstration policy for e-commerce in rural areas can stimulate the use of information and communication technology by rural women, leverage the crucial role of non-traditional education in skill development, alleviate financial and social capital constraints for rural women, and inspire a wave of rural women entrepreneurship. The paper argues that the construction of rural e-commerce has the potential to empower rural women entrepreneurship.