An empirical study on the driving factors of high-quality digital economy development: A case of Jiangsu province, China

Against the backdrop of China's economic transition from high-speed growth to high-quality development, the digital economy has emerged as a core driver of regional development. Although existing studies have investigated the factors influencing the "high-quality" development of the digital economy at the provincial level, they have failed to systematically identify the internal driving factors within developed provinces. Taking Jiangsu Province as a case study, this paper designs an evaluation index system and employs the Entropy Weight Method and Principal Component Analysis to examine the driving factors and evolutionary characteristics of high-quality digital economy development in Jiangsu from 2014 to 2023. The findings reveal that: (1) the comprehensive development level of Jiangsu's digital economy remained largely stable after peaking in 2017, exhibiting an overall upward trend when excluding the impact of the pandemic; (2) innovation capacity and green development are the primary driving forces behind the high-quality development of Jiangsu's digital economy, while the contribution of the high-tech foundation of the digital industry remains relatively low and requires further improvement. The theoretical contributions of this paper are twofold: first, it operationalizes the concept of "high-quality development" into a multi-dimensional evaluation index system, enriching the methodological approaches to digital economy research; second, based on principal component analysis, it identifies the core driving factors and their contribution structure for high-quality digital economy development in a developed province, providing an empirical basis for targeted policy formulation. The study recommends that Jiangsu further strengthen the integrated development of high-tech industries and the digital economy, fully leverage the complementary regional advantages of Southern, Central, and Northern Jiangsu, and promote coordinated development of the digital economy across the province.