Abstract: Ensuring and improving people's livelihoods is a crucial task in Chinese modernization. Administrative border regions lag relatively behind in livelihood development due to factors such as geographical barriers and administrative fragmentation. The digital economy enables border regions to break down geographical and administrative barriers, bringing new opportunities and challenges to livelihood development. Based on data from 67 border counties in the urban agglomeration in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River from 2018 to 2022, this paper constructs evaluation systems for the digital economy and people's livelihood development and employs methods like 2SLS to analyze the impact of the digital economy on people's livelihoods in border regions. The research findings are as follows: 1) Both the digital economy and people's livelihood development in the study area have rapidly transitioned from 'unbalanced and relatively low levels' to 'relatively balanced and higher levels', with a more significant improvement in people's livelihoods and a more complex pattern; 2) The digital economy, with its geographical penetration and cross-administrative-region features, has significantly propelled people's livelihood development; 3) Government expenditure, per capita GDP, fixed-asset investment, and urbanization level serve as important transmission channels through which the digital economy enhances people's livelihoods, all contributing to improving livelihoods; 4) The impact of the digital economy on people's livelihoods demonstrates a distance-decay characteristic, and remote counties face constraints from factors such as infrastructure, information flow, and skill adaptation, which dampen its positive effects.