Will the Construction of Smart Cities Increase the Urban-Rural Income Gap? An Analysis Based on the Perspective of Economic Agglomeration

As smart city development deepens, its impact on the urban-rural income gap has become a key concern for both the government and society. This article uses panel data from Chinese prefecture-level cities between 2010 and 2022, treating the pilot smart city policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and applying a multi-period difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically examine how smart city construction affects the urban-rural income gap. It also analyzes the role of economic agglomeration in this process. The research indicates that smart city development has significantly increased the incomes of urban and rural residents and has positively contributed to sharing development benefits between these areas. Mechanism analysis shows that economic agglomeration plays an important mediating and threshold role—smart cities indirectly influence the urban-rural income distribution by fostering economic agglomeration, with this effect showing nonlinear characteristics at different levels of agglomeration. Based on these findings, the article proposes policy recommendations aimed at optimizing economic agglomeration models and advancing urban-rural integrated development, offering theoretical insights and practical strategies for narrowing the income gap and promoting common prosperity.