Abstract: The high-tech industry is an important part of building a modernized economic system. Coordinating the balance between the digital economy and the level of economic development is an important prerequisite for improving the resilience of the high-tech industry, and identifying the effect of the digital economy on the resilience of the high-tech industry at different stages of economic development is crucial. Based on the new structural economics, this paper empirically examines the effect of the digital economy on the resilience of the high-tech industry with the provincial panel data from 2011 to 2022. The results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between the digital economy and the resilience of high-tech industries. At different stages of economic development, the effect of digital economy on the resilience of high-tech industries is different. The results of the heterogeneity analysis show that the digital economy has a significant positive effect on the resilience of high-tech industries in the “three provinces and one city” and the upstream provinces, while having a negative effect on the downstream provinces. The mechanism analysis shows that the digital economy can generate an “income effect” on its industrial resilience by promoting industrial structure upgrading, and this effect becomes more pronounced as the economy develops. Therefore, various regions should continue to promote the development of the digital economy, taking into account the cultivation of high-tech industries, and formulating development strategies based on regional factor endowment structure and industrial structure, in order to fully utilize the digital economy to promote the upgrading of high-tech industries.

Key words: digital economy, resilience of high-tech industries, the development stage, new structural economics