Intelligent Manufacturing and Urban-Rural Integration: A Study of the Impact of Industrial Robot Application and Emerging Urban-Rural Relationships in China

Based on the International Federation of Robotics (IFR) data and Chinese prefecture-level city panel data, this paper empirically examines the impact of industrial robot application on urban-rural integration development and its mechanism. It is found that: (1) industrial robot application significantly promotes urban-rural integrated development, and this conclusion still holds after solving the endogeneity problem and passing the robustness test of replacing the measurement method and eliminating special samples; (2) there is spatio-temporal heterogeneity in the promotion of robot application, with the effect in central and western regions being stronger than that in eastern regions, and showing a trend of marginal decreasing over time, with the most significant promotion effect in the policy-guided period (2007); (3) Industrial coordination is an important mechanism for robots to promote urban-rural integration, and robots indirectly enhance the endogenous power of urban-rural integration by optimizing industrial structure upgrading and three-industry synergy. The study suggests that the government should promote the intelligent transformation of agricultural production, strengthen the differentiated policy support in central and western regions, and focus on skills training to alleviate the risk of structural unemployment, so as to unleash the dividends of smart manufacturing on the high-quality development of urban and rural areas.