Unlocking the Integration Mechanism: How Digital Village Construction Promotes Agro-Cultural-Tourism Development through Rural E-Commerce

Globally, rural revitalization requires new drivers. China’s Digital Village Construction (DVC) offers a strategic context to examine how digitalization fosters rural industrial integration, specifically in agriculture, culture, and tourism (ACT).Utilizing cross-sectional data from 225 counties in China’s Yangtze River Delta, we construct a comprehensive ACT integration evaluation index. Instrumental variable and mediation effect models empirically analyze DVC’s impact mechanism, focusing on rural e-commerce’s mediating role.The findings indicate that:(1) ACT integration shows significant regional disparity, with higher levels in Zhejiang Province compared to Jiangsu and Anhui. (2) DVC significantly promotes ACT integration both directly and indirectly through rural e-commerce. Digital finance, cultural tourism, and marketing empower e-commerce with capital, talent/technology, and market access, respectively, driving integration. (3) The promoting effects of DVC dimensions rank (descending): infrastructure, life, economic, and governance digitization.The study elucidates a clear sequential pathway in which the construction of digital infrastructure facilitates the activation of rural e-commerce platforms, which in turn drives deeper integration among agriculture, culture, and tourism industries. These findings provide critical empirical evidence for optimizing digital village policies to foster synergistic rural industrial development and revitalization.