Sustainable Economic Development, Digital Payment, and Consumer Demand: Evidence from China

In this era, the global COVID-19 pandemic has hit the economy hard. In the context of great challenges to sustainable economic development, it is of great practical significance to study how digital payment can promote consumer demand and sustainable economic development. From the perspective of sustainable economic development, this paper selects panel data of various provinces in China from 2011 to 2020 to test the correlation between digital payment and consumer demand by constructing econometric models and selecting relevant indicators, so as to reveal the impact of digital payment on consumer demand and sustainable economic development. Research shows that: (1) in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, digital payments play a special and very important role in promoting household consumption and sustainable economic development; (2) the empirical results show that digital payment has a significant positive impact on consumer demand, which indicates that digital payment has an obvious promotion effect on consumer demand; (3) further research shows that the impact of digital payment on consumer demand has obvious heterogeneity. From the perspective of regional differences, digital payment has a significant positive impact on consumer demand in the eastern and western regions, while the impact is not obvious in the northeast and central regions, even though it also has a positive impact. From the perspective of urban-rural differences, digital payment has a significant impact on consumer demand in both urban and rural areas, and this impact is greater in rural areas than in urban areas. However, from the perspective of development stage, the stage characteristics of digital payment’s impact on consumer demand in each region are not obvious, which may be caused by the short sample range. In addition, this paper also puts forward relevant suggestions for other countries to learn from.