Objective quantitative evaluation of the role of digital economy on rural economic development in the context of rural revitalization

In the context of rural revitalization, the research in this paper firstly excavates the mechanism of the digital economy’s role in rural economic development and explores the development trend of the data economy. The evaluation system of the rural digital economic development level is constructed based on the needs of rural economic development, combined with the entropy value objective assignment method. Based on this basis, the impact of the digital economy and rural revitalization is analyzed using gray correlation degree and spatial economic distance matrix. The three indicators of information and communication, digital economy industry, and innovation ability have a greater degree of influence on the development status of the rural digital economy, with weights accounting for 21.05%, 38.12%, and 22.25%, respectively. The gray correlation between the level of digital industrialization, the level of industrial digitization, and the level of economic development varies between 0.687 and 0.852 and 0.491 and 0.643, respectively, and the correlation between them and the level of high-quality economic development is obvious. From a spatial point of view, the Moran indexes of the development level of rural revitalization and the development level of the digital economy are both significantly positive, and p is less than 0.05, and there is an obvious spatial clustering phenomenon in both the digital economy and rural revitalization. This study provides a new path for exploring the balanced development of China’s digital economy and promoting rural economic revitalization and provides theoretical references and a realistic basis for narrowing the urban-rural economic gap. © 2024 Zhihua Liang, published by Sciendo.