School of Public Policy and Management, Guangxi University, Nanning, China.
Institute of Green Development and Borderland Governance, Guangxi University, Nanning, China.
Front Public Health. 2024 Jul 26;12:1419629. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2024.1419629. eCollection 2024.
Digital transformation in rural areas has become a key policy priority worldwide. China is also implementing a digital village strategy and actively promoting the digital transformation of rural governance to improve the well-being of rural residents. The literature suggests that digital governance is linked to health, but the mechanisms behind this relationship remain unclear.
Using data from the 2021 China Land Economic Survey (CLES), this paper examines the impact of digital governance on the health, longevity, and mental health of rural residents. To enhance the robustness of the conclusions, this paper also introduces a dual machine learning model to solve the endogeneity problem of the model.
This study concludes that digital governance has a significant positive impact on the health of rural residents. This finding remains consistent even after addressing endogeneity issues and conducting numerous robustness tests. Mechanistic analyses indicate that digital governance can enhance rural residents' health by improving village governance (environmental governance) and increasing the efficiency of access to personal information. Further analysis reveals that digital governance significantly increases the life expectancy of rural residents but that its effect on mental health is not significant. This study provides new insights into how digital governance affects health, with important implications for health policy development.
农村地区的数字化转型已成为全球的一项关键政策重点。中国也在实施数字乡村战略，积极推动农村治理的数字化转型，以提高农村居民的福祉。文献表明，数字治理与健康有关，但这种关系背后的机制仍不清楚。
本文利用 2021 年中国土地经济调查（CLES）的数据，考察了数字治理对农村居民健康、长寿和心理健康的影响。为了增强结论的稳健性，本文还引入了双重机器学习模型来解决模型的内生性问题。
本研究得出结论，数字治理对农村居民的健康有显著的积极影响。即使在解决了内生性问题并进行了多次稳健性测试后，这一发现仍然一致。机制分析表明，数字治理可以通过改善乡村治理（环境治理）和提高个人信息获取效率来提高农村居民的健康水平。进一步的分析表明，数字治理显著提高了农村居民的预期寿命，但对心理健康的影响并不显著。本研究为数字治理如何影响健康提供了新的见解，对健康政策的制定具有重要意义。
