Research on the effect of e-commerce adoption in improving farmers' income and welfare in the context of digital economy

Abstract

In the era of digital economy, e-commerce, as an important economic model with the characteristics of the times, has a profound impact on the development of rural economy, and e-commerce of agricultural products has become a new driving force to promote agricultural industrialization, digitalization and increase farmers' income. Considering the sample selection bias and endogeneity, this paper uses multiple regression model to benchmark and two-stage regression to measure the effect of e-commerce participation on the improvement of farmers' business performance, and finds that the adoption of e-commerce of agricultural products is helpful to increase agricultural income, but it is not as significant as the impact of land area, and even less than the factors affecting income such as labor force and brand building. However, the positive impact of the adoption of e-commerce of agricultural products on farmers' income will increase with the deepening of their e-commerce adoption, especially in the later stage, and the network scale effect will be gradually released.