Research on the Income Growth Effect of Farmers' Participation in E-commerce in Poor Areas

Abstract

With the continuous development of e-commerce in China's rural areas, whether e-commerce can increase farmers' income has been paid more and more attention. Based on the field investigation of farmer households in two counties of Guangxi, this paper analyzes the correlation between farmers' participation in e-commerce decisions and the income level of farmers' families, and uses the endogenous transformation model to make an empirical analysis of the income level gap between farmers' participation in e-commerce and farmers' non-participation in e-commerce samples. The results show that the income level of farmers who participate in e-commerce of agricultural products is significantly higher than that of farmers who do not participate in e-commerce. The counterfactual hypothesis analysis results show that the adoption of e-commerce may significantly increase farmers' total household income by 10.3% and planting income by 11.3%. The adoption of e-commerce will widen the income gap among farmers. Under the assumption of rational smallholder farmers, this gap is the income increase effect of the adoption of e-commerce.