Abstract: The construction of digital village is an important driving force to break through the bottleneck of unbalanced development in rural areas and achieve common prosperity of farmers and rural areas. Different from the previous literature, which mainly focused on the impact of digital village on income level and urban-rural income inequality, this paper constructs a relative deprivation index to expand the research on digital village and household income from the perspective of intra-rural income inequality. It is found that the development of digital village has obvious characteristics of poverty benefit and can alleviate the income inequality of farmers. This result is still robust after the robustness test and overcoming the endogeneity. The analysis of relevant mechanisms shows that digital village development mainly reduces the intra-rural income gap by increasing entrepreneurial opportunities and expanding non-agricultural employment. In addition, the heterogeneity study found that digital village development had a stronger effect on alleviating the income inequality of farmers in counties in central and western China, mountainous and hilly counties and national-level poor counties. This means that the development of digital villages should be better promoted in the future.

Key words: digital village, income inequality of farmers, pro-poorness, common prosperity