The Impact of the Digital Economy on High-Quality Development: An Analysis Based on the National Big Data Comprehensive Test Area

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Essentially, the empirical evidence in this manuscript discusses the impact of the policy of "big national data comprehensive experimental areas" on high-quality economic development at the provincial level in China.

First of all, the hypothesis development is therefore too general and does not discuss the specific policy very well. The discussion of mechanism of the digital economy is also not convincing.

Second, the current dependent variable does not seem to be able to accurately measure high-quality economic development. At the same time, there are too many factors affecting high-quality economic development, even though the DID approach is used. The model does not control well for, for example, region and time fixed effects. These lead to unconvincing empirical results. 

Third, the English writting is confusing to read.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The article is correctly structured. The authors presented the purpose of the article, characterized the research background and presented the research design.

The article only lacks a discussion of the results against the background of contemporary literature.Suggestions to supplement the article with a point - discussion.

This article recommends for publication.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The idea of the study is interesting, however, I would like to make several recommendations that would potentially help the authors to improve the quality and readability of the manuscript, as well as its contribution to the literature.

·        The title of the paper is not very clear. I would suggest to make it more specific.

·         authors do not provide information about their affiliations

·         authors should follow the requirements of reference citation in the text (there is no need to insert footnote for references), as well as, paper formatting requirements must be revised

·         In the Introduction authors present very broad information about influencing factors of HQD but it does not adequately address the relevance of the study, nor it provides sufficient background information about digital economy impact on economic development related issues in the world in general and in China in particular. I would suggest authors not only report the previous research but emphasize what done and what's lacking in the scientific literature which could support the relevance of the research. Also, the main relationship is not explained in literature review – between HQD and dummy variable.

·         To my opinion, all Hypothesis need deeper argumentation

·         Authors do not specify what is the general sample, they just state that model is based on the high-quality economic development index of 31 provinces. What is number of all provinces in the country?

·         Research method - very weak justification for its choice. The description of the research procedure is also insufficient. In Table 1 I would suggest to put the titles of the variables not their abbreviations because it’s very difficult to follow the information. In Section 3 authors apply different methods but they are clearly presented in Section 2.

·         Regarding Placebo test – authors state that “10 provinces and cities were randomly selected from 31 provinces and cities as the "pseudo experimental group" and the rest as the control group”. Why only 10 provinces? What were the criteria for selection of these provinces? And how authors distinguish provinces which had policy treatment and which didn’t have?

·         Results should be supported with more interpretation and argumentation not only as statistical report. Compare your opinions with previous studies and highlight the novelty of your research.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

First, too many core citations are from Chinese journal, and I cannot judge their reliability and validity. Authors must read more literature from mainstream international journals, and replace these Chinese journal papers as the reference.

Secondly, I am very confused about how the authors conducted PSM with the samples containing only 31 provinces of China. Could the size of the treatment and control groups can meet the requirements of PSM? And according to the parallel trend test (directly from the figure), the gap between treatment and control groups is already significant before the policy implementation. It may indicate that the provinces having implemented the digitalization policy have a higher development quality than others before the policy.

Third, authors should seek professional proofreading agencies to undertake the language washing.

The current manuscript is still very problematic and cannot be accepted at this status.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors need to pay attention to article formatting requirements, i.e. reference citation in the text, equation formatting and etc.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. According to the published paper template, we modified the quotation and formula format in the text.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The current manuscript might meet the publication requirements.