Are vulnerable farmers more easily influenced? Heterogeneous effects of Internet use on the adoption of integrated pest management

Abstract

The Internet is believed to bring more technological dividends to vulnerable farmers during the green agriculture transformation. However, this is different from the theory of skill-biased technological change, which emphasizes that individuals with higher levels of human capital and more technological endowments benefit more. This study investigates the effects of Internet use on farmers’ adoption of integrated pest management (IPM), theoretically and empirically, based on a dataset containing 1 015 farmers in China's Shandong Province. By exploring the perspective of rational inattention, the reasons for the heterogeneity of the effects across farmers with different endowments, i.e., education and land size, are analyzed. The potential endogeneity issues are addressed using the endogenous switching probit model. The results reveal that: (1) although Internet use significantly positively affects farmers’ adoption of IPM, vulnerable farmers do not benefit more from it. Considerable selection bias leads to an overestimation of technological dividends for vulnerable farmers; (2) different sources of technology information lead to the difference in the degree of farmers’ rational inattention toward Internet information, which plays a crucial role in the heterogeneous effect of Internet use; and (3) excessive dependence on strong-tie social network information sources entraps vulnerable farmers in information cocoons, hindering their ability to reap the benefits of Internet use fully. Therefore, it is essential to promote services geared towards elderly-oriented Internet agricultural technology information and encourage farmers with strong Internet utilization skills to share technology information with other farmers actively.