Rural smartness: Its determinants and impacts on rural economic welfare

Abstract

Solving urbanization problems, especially in developing countries, solely through the adoption of smartness in urban areas is insufficient as urbanization is mostly driven by the wide urban-rural economic gap. To narrow this gap, the adoption of smartness needs to be extended into rural areas. However, studies in that direction are still lacking. Therefore, we developed a theoretical model that explains the determinants of rural smartness and its subsequent consequences on rural economic welfare. We validated the model with survey data from 179 villages in West Java Province, Indonesia. The results suggest that rural smartness is determined by the interplay of organizational, environmental, and technological readiness, and has a strong positive impact on innovativeness which, in turn, improves the competitiveness of the rural business ecosystem. This model can serve as a reference for further studies of rural smartness and as the foundation for the design of information platforms supporting it.

Is the Timber Construction Sector Prepared for E-Commerce via Instagram®? A Perspective from Brazil

“…The sampling was perceptibly significant, as it considered all companies with profiles on Instagram ® , whose sum includes 80% of the entire sector (Table 4). In practice, our study outperformed the recent market contributions with relevant samples driven by interviews such as Arnold et al [50], Bıçakcıo glu-Peynirci and Tanyeri [51], Dhaundiyal and Coughlan [52], Fan et al [53], Förster et al [54], Le et al [55], Mukti et al [56], Padilla-Lozano and Collazzo [57], Saabye et al [58], Schnurr et al [59], and others.…”

Power of Digital Economy to Drive Urban-Rural Integration: Intrinsic Mechanism and Spatial Effect, from Perspective of Multidimensional Integration

“…Based on the aforesaid interpretation of the intrinsic mechanisms and relevant research results [ 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 25 , 26 , 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 ], urban-rural integration was measured in four dimensions, namely equivalent allocation of urban and rural factors, integration of three industries in urban and rural areas, equalization of urban and rural public services, and convergence of urban and rural resident consumption in this research. Given the availability of data regarding the equivalent allocation of urban and rural factors, the allocation of four factors, including the capital, labor force, technologies, and land, was measured.…”

“…The digital economy stimulates the integration of three industries in urban and rural areas, including two types of integration. From the angle of industry chain integration, the digital economy permeates the production, processing, sales, and other links of urban and rural industries, forming the basic industry models of digital production, digital logistics, and digital marketing [ 31 ]. For instance, the production link of the supply side covers intelligent farms and intelligent agricultural machinery, the logistics link covers the blockchain-based source tracing and logistics cloud muster house, and the digital marketing of the demand side covers digital exhibition and brand marketing.…”

Architecting rural smartness: A collaborative platform design for rural digital business ecosystem

“…The main objective of this paper is to fill this gap by providing a reference architecture of a rural smartness platform that facilitates the emergence and consolidation of the rural smartness business ecosystem. The resulting digital ecosystem is grounded in the characteristics of rural smartness which are empirically proven to have a strong positive impact on improving the rural economic climate (Mukti et al, 2022). Furthermore, the reference architecture is specified using the ArchiMate modeling language (The Open Group, 2019).…”

“…We put forward the idea that such a platform works as a mechanism to unlock the economic potential of the rural economy and stimulates the establishment of DBE in rural areas. Furthermore, as we will further explain in the following section, the proposed reference architecture is both grounded in design science, and at the same time backed by empirical evidence coming from previous work by Mukti et al (2022) that studies the societal impacts of rural smartness. As suggested by De Leoz and Petter (2018), by incorporating the societal impact in the design process, the reference architecture presented in this paper is expected to be more effective in improving the rural economic climate when being implemented.…”