The process of rural cultural development can be considered as one of the factors that play a crucial role in rural revitalization and also offer a valuable ideological and cultural contribution towards implementing that policy in a unified manner. In the current research, an assessment system of rural cultural development is created, and the DEA-Malmquist measure is used to evaluate how rural cultural development actions have been implemented in a particular region in the timeframe between 2012 and 2023. When rural cultural development is used as the explanatory variable, its impact on rural revitalization is examined in terms of benchmark regression, dynamic panel estimation based on the system GMM estimator, and threshold-effect models. It is found that the sample area had relatively good results on rural cultural development in 2013-2019 with overall scores of over 1. Nevertheless, additional improvement is still needed since the average overall score in 2012-23 was 0.984, which is less than 1. The empirical evidence confirms that rural cultural development has a significant positive effect on rural revitalization at the 1 percent level. Moreover, the promotion effect is enhanced when it is supported by more effective government policy.
