Improving the consumer welfare of rural residents through public support policies: A study on old revolutionary areas in China

Improvement of the welfare of rural residents of less developed areas is one of the key United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This study uses the panel data of prefecture-level cities from 2009 to 2020 and a difference-in-differences model to evaluate the impact of the Old Revolutionary Development Program (ORDP) of China on the consumer welfare of rural residents. Results indicate that the implementation of the ORDP plays a significant role in improving the consumer welfare of the rural residents of old revolutionary base areas in China. Specifically, the ORDP implementation can improve the consumer welfare of the rural residents by increasing the local fiscal expenditure and narrowing the income gap between the urban and rural areas. In addition, the intervention of the ORDP has a heterogeneous effect on the consumer welfare of the rural residents of different regions, and the effect is larger in regions with high fiscal expenditure, satisfactory economic development, high urbanization, and small urban–rural income gap. The findings can enrich the theoretical basis of regional development planning with Chinese characteristics and provide a new reference for the policy practice of the sustainable development of residents in underdeveloped areas.