Abstract: Digital economy is an important part of the modernization framework of the economic system, and its high-quality development is inseparable from the support of effective supporting policy system. This paper constructs the analysis framework of “policy tool-policy preference”, and takes the digital economic development policies issued by China’s provincial governments since 2017 as a sample to carry out documents quantitative research. The study finds that local governments have given all-round regulation and support to the development of digital economy. Even so, there have been some problems in China’s provincial digital economy policies, such as the lack of balance of basic policy tools and their internal structure, significant differences in the layout of policy preferences, and insufficient combination adaptability between policy tools and policy preferences. Local governments should start from optimizing the structural system of policy tools, promoting the balanced development of the layout of policy preferences, paying attention to the overall adaptation of policy tools and policy preferences so as to promote the healthy and sustainable development of digital economy.

Key words: digital economy, policy tools, policy preference, documents quantitative research