Does rural e-commerce agglomeration help expand family farms' size? Evidence from Taobao villages in China's Yangtze River Delta

In the digital transformation era led by 5G, artificial intelligence, blockchain, and other digital technologies, rural e-commerce promotes the development of family farms with advanced digital technologies to achieve economies of scale in agriculture. To this end, we analyze the influence of rural e-commerce agglomeration on family farms using fixed effects, GMM, the spatial Durbin model, and the mediating effects model based on an urban panel dataset in the Yangtze River Delta region of China from 2015 to 2020. The main outcomes show that (1) rural e-commerce agglomeration helps expand family farms, and there is a positive spatial spillover effect, (2) the greater the city's scale and amount of human capital, the greater the effect of Rural e-commerce agglomeration on family farms, and (3) rural e-commerce agglomeration contributes to the development of family farms through the knowledge overflow effect, infrastructure sharing effect and matching labor effect. The findings from this study's research help improve the development planning of rural e-commerce, explore the driving force of digital agricultural transformation, and provide valuable references for other countries and regions to cultivate family farms.