Households In China Research Articles

Family Involvement on the Effective Use of Education Technology in China: Status, Influence and Suggestions

The integration of Educational Technology (EdTech) into learning environments is transforming both formal education and family-based learning across the globe. In China, where the educational landscape is rapidly evolving, families play a crucial role in mediating the use of EdTech. This paper first explores the current state of EdTech use in households in China, including the types of EdTech tools used, the role of the family, and the existing regional differences. The influence of family factors on the adoption and effectiveness of EdTech for learning at home is further examined. Parents attitudes toward technology, particularly their willingness to engage with EdTech tools, play a pivotal role in determining how effectively these tools are used at home. Families socioeconomic status and parents education level also influence their ability to guide their children. Family relationships and how parents and children interact with technology also shape the effectiveness of EdTech. The paper concludes with recommendations for stakeholders, including parents, schools, and policymakers, on better leveraging EdTech for childrens academic and cognitive development. The findings suggest that family-centered EdTech design, enhanced collaboration between schools and families, and continuous parental learning can help maximize the potential of these technologies to improve learning experiences.

Improving mechanization conditions or encouraging non-grain crop production? Strategies for mitigating farmland abandonment in China’s mountainous areas

Food security is a critical global issue, requiring that the challenges of farmland abandonment be addressed. As a vital component of agricultural production in China, farmland use is affected by mechanization conditions and the crop cultivation decisions of rural households. With the decreasing economic viability of farmland in China’s mountainous areas, the effects of mechanization conditions and non-grain crop production on farmland abandonment remain controversial. This study developed a theoretical framework and used unique survey data from 2400 rural households in China’s mountainous areas to analyze the relationship between mechanization conditions, non-grain crop production, and farmland abandonment using multiple models, heterogeneity analysis, and factual characteristics analysis. These findings demonstrate that improving mechanization conditions and encouraging non-grain crop production could mitigate farmland abandonment. Non-grain crop production could mitigate abandonment through increasing agricultural labor input, and improving mechanization conditions could inhibit non-grain crop production. Additionally, improving mechanization conditions had a more significant effect on households with higher education level and lower incomes, while encouraging non-grain crop production showed an opposite trend. Both measures had greater effect in the western and low-altitude regions. Therefore, to protect farmland and ensure food security in mountainous areas, it is necessary to continue land consolidation appropriately, actively encourage non-grain crop production, and comprehensively balance the demands of different management objectives.

Digital literacy and green consumption in rural households: the moderating effect of social participation

ABSTRACT Rural household consumption significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. Promoting green consumption among rural households is essential for achieving global sustainable development. By applying the cost signalling theory and the social affiliation hypothesis, our study, which utilized a panel dataset of 4179 rural households in China, found that digital literacy significantly enhances green consumption among rural households. The robustness of these findings is corroborated by instrumental variable method-based tests. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that social participation acts as a moderating factor, diminishing the impact of digital literacy on promoting green consumption in rural households. In contrast, environmental awareness does not exhibit a significant influence in this context. Research holds significant theoretical and practical importance in promoting green consumption among rural households.

Out-of-pocket health expenditure, social protection, and life expectancy of female-headed households in China.

This study explores the relationship between out-of-pocket health expenditure, social protection interventions, and life expectancy of female-headed households in China. The study was based on data extracted from the World Bank (2021) Global Financial Inclusion Index (Global Findex) and applied the descriptive statistics and the Ordinary Least Squares Regression (OLS). The results show that there is a significant positive coefficient for social protection in total households, females, and males, indicating a beneficial link between social protection programs and life expectancy in female-headed households in China. Conversely, negative coefficients for out-of-pocket health expenditure suggest that higher healthcare costs are associated with lower life expectancy, highlighting the financial strain on these households. These submissions justify the necessity for social protection interventions in improving health outcomes and addressing financial barriers to healthcare access for female-headed households in China.

Self-Owned or Outsourced? The Impact of Farm Machinery Adoption Decisions on Chinese Farm Households’ Operating Income

Using farm machinery plays a significant role in easing the issue of slowing growth of operating income among farm households in China. Drawing data from CFPS2018, this study adopts a multinomial endogenous switching regression (MESR) to analyze the factors influencing farm households’ choices regarding self-owned farm machinery and outsourced machinery services, as well as their subsequent impact on operating income. The results of the study show that the characteristics of the head of household, family, village, and region have a significant impact on the farm households’ selection of whether to use self-owned machinery or outsourced services. Furthermore, the exclusive use of self-owned farm machinery and the combined use of both self-owned and outsourced machinery substantially enhance farm households’ operating income. An additional analysis indicates that these two types of machinery are complementary, and their combined use generates a superimposed effect that further boosts income. These findings suggest that the combined use of self-owned and outsourced machinery is optimal for farm households who wish to expand their operating income.

Proportion of land transfer proceeds for rural development, the rural household income, and the debt risk of the rural households in China

Proportion of land transfer proceeds for rural development, the rural household income, and the debt risk of the rural households in China

Does smartphone use encourage farmers to participate in centralized household waste disposal?

The centralization of household waste disposal represents a significant stride toward achieving ecological viability in rural China. This initiative can substantially alleviate the grassroots government's burden of managing rural household waste. The proliferation and utilization of smartphones, a powerful tool that can expedite and reduce the cost of imparting environmental protection knowledge to producers, is a beacon of hope in the fight against waste. This article, utilizing Probit modeling and micro-survey data from 2126 agricultural households in China, examines the effect of smartphone usage on farmers' participation in centralized household waste disposal. The findings indicate that smartphone usage significantly enhances farmers' engagement in centralized domestic waste disposal, motivating them to participate actively. Notably, this finding persists even after robustness tests. Further heterogeneity analyses indicate that older and low-income populations exhibit a more pronounced level of engagement in centralized household waste disposal. This paper presents these findings and underscores the importance of the proposed policies to enhance farmers' consciousness regarding the environmental implications of smartphone usage. These policies are not just suggestions but urgent and necessary steps towards a more technologically advanced and efficient waste management system, and their implementation is crucial for the future of waste management.

Reallocate to the right place: The heterogeneous effect of internet use on factor allocation of rural households in China

How to improve factor (mis)allocation is an important topic for both economists and policy-makers. In the digital economy era, existing studies have investigated the impact of information and communication technologies on factor allocation of rural households, but little is known about the heterogenous effect on farmers with differentiated productivity. This study uses panel data from the Chinese Family Panel Studies from 2010 to 2020, to examine the impact of Internet use on factor allocation of rural households from the view of heterogeneity in their productivities. The results suggest that Internet use facilitates a flow of land from low- to high-productivity farmers, and farm labor migration to off-farm activities. Such effect is achieved though easing information constraints and all farmers gain higher income after the reallocation. Our findings suggest that promoting Internet penetration and its functions can help reduce misallocation and improve welfare in rural areas.

Private Educational Expenditure Inequality between Migrant and Urban Households in China’s Cities

This paper studies households’ expenditure on the education of children in China’s cities to assess how internal migrant families’ investment in the human capital of their offspring differs from that of local urban families. The private education-related expenditure reflects both households’ willingness to invest in human capital and institutional constraints, as China’s household registration (hukou) system prevents children without a local city hukou from enrolling in urban public schools. In-school fees (consisting of statutory tuition and institutional tuition fees) are commonly topped-up with substantial private tutoring expenditure. We apply multiple regression to the 2008 “Rural–Urban Migration Survey in China” data to analyze the average expenditure differences between temporary migrants, permanent migrants and locals. The findings are, after controlling for social and economic characteristics, that: (1) the overall spending on education of migrant households overwhelmingly exceeds that of locals, which is expected since migrants must finance privately all education-related expenses their children incur; (2) migrant households spend more on institutional tuition fees compared to households with a local city hukou, reflecting the varying severity of administrative hurdles faced by families; and (3) temporary migrants spend more on institutional tuition fees than permanent migrant households, but less in private tutoring.

Digital economy, risk attitudes, and entrepreneurial decision-making in urban and rural households in China

Using data from the 2019 China Household Finance Survey, this study examines how the digital economy and household risk attitudes affect entrepreneurial decision-making in urban and rural Chinese households. Risk-taking families are more likely to become entrepreneurs, particularly in economically developed eastern regions. Furthermore, integrating the digital economy boosts entrepreneurial activities within households, especially in the central and western regions. Based on these findings, the government and relevant institutions should strengthen digital infrastructure in the central and western regions, as well as establish an evaluation and monitoring mechanism to ensure the effectiveness of policy measures to promote balanced economic development and sustainable growth in household entrepreneurial activity.

Identification and prediction of the degree of multidimensional returning to poverty risk for the household in China through the novel hybrid model: Based on the survey data of China Family Panel Studies (CFPS)

In China, absolute poverty has been effectively eliminated, but this does not signify the complete eradication of poverty. Instead, poverty persists in the forms of relative and secondary poverty. More concerningly, regions or households lifted out of poverty continue to face numerous risks of returning to poverty. In this context, measuring poverty solely based on monetary metrics is no longer adequate. Furthermore, the primary focus of grassroots governance has shifted from merely assessing poverty to accurately predicting the multifaceted risks associated with falling back into poverty. A multidimensional poverty indicator system is constructed to measure and predict the risk of multidimensional returning to poverty in China. Then, the Alkire–Forster counting method is applied to measure the risk of multidimensional poverty return and demonstrate the contribution of various indicators to multidimensional poverty return using tracking survey data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS). The results show that the multidimensional poverty return in China is mainly caused by the factors in two or three dimensions, where the social development capability dimension has the highest contribution to the multidimensional poverty return index with 43.12 %, followed by the health and education dimensions. Moreover, according to the finding that the identification of multidimensional poverty varies with the values of the poverty cut-off, a novel and practicable method is proposed to classify the risk into three levels, noted as the high, medium and low levels. Consequently, a hybrid model is constructed to predict the risk of multidimensional poverty return by integrating the Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA), variational mode decomposition (VMD) and Bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) neural networks. Finally, the performance of the constructed model is validated with an accuracy up to 99.81 %. The constructed model's efforts outperform the traditional BiLSTM and several prevalent machine learning algorithms through extensive comparative experiments. These results illustrate that the proposed model can accurately and stably predict the potential risk of poverty return for multidimensional poverty groups and regions. In conclusion, drawing from the analysis of factors contributing to the risk of relapsing into poverty in this study, policy suggestions have been formulated focusing on education, social capacity enhancement, and healthcare system advancement. In summary, this paper provides new insights into the factors contributing to multidimensional poverty recurrence and the methods for assessing its risk levels, while also introducing a more precise approach to predicting these levels.

The entrepreneurial effect of digital infrastructure development: micro evidence from China

ABSTRACT According to the Resource Dependence Theory (RDT), this study examines the entrepreneurial impact of digital infrastructure development on households in China. Drawing from a quasi-natural experiment of the Broadband China strategy, we applied the staggered difference-in-differences method. Our baseline results show that digital infrastructure development increases the likelihood of household entrepreneurship. Moreover, we found that this positive effect may be explained by information advantage, social network expansion, and financial constraint alleviation. Additionally, further analysis indicates that digital infrastructure development enhances household entrepreneurial performance and shows inclusive characteristics that are more conducive to promoting entrepreneurship among disadvantaged groups; through entrepreneurship, digital infrastructure development further promotes household economic welfare. Our research not only broadens the applicability of RDT within the digital economy domain but also significantly contributes to the information technology for development literature.

The Role of Procedural Fairness: Land Titling Programs and Agricultural Investment in China

This study examines the moderating role of procedural fairness between land titling programs and agricultural investment. We constructed a theoretical model that introduces perceived security of land tenure and procedural fairness into the traditional “property rights-investment incentives” analytical framework. Moreover, we empirically analyze the impact of land titling and its procedural fairness on agricultural investment using data from the “Thousands of People, Hundreds of Villages” survey held in 2018 among 9596 households in China. The empirical analyses were conducted by using the ordinary least squares (OLS), probit, and instrumental variable methods. Our analysis showed that land titling in China significantly promotes agricultural investment by farm households and that procedural fairness has a significant positive moderating role in the investment incentive effect of land titling as well as significantly improving the institutional credibility of land titling and enhancing farmers’ perceived land tenure security.

Does housing purchase affect entrepreneurship? -Evidence from urban households in China

The study applies an endogenous switching probit model, using the data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) to explore the joint decision mechanism between housing purchase and entrepreneurship and estimate the (treatment) effect of housing-purchase on entrepreneurship. The findings are threefold. First, a higher housing price reduces the probability of house-purchase intention, and also that of actual house-purchase-action. Second, both house-purchase-intention and -action discourage actual entrepreneurship investment. Third, house-purchase-intention has a negative effect on potential entrepreneurship plans, while house-purchase-action encourages households to plan for a business in the future.

Industrial robot applications and individual migration decision: evidence from households in China

The integration of industrial robot application (IRA) into various sectors has catalyzed significant transformations in the labor market, reshaping the dynamics of individual migration decision (IMD). As industries increasingly adopt automation, the implications for workforce distribution and migration patterns become critical areas of study. Based on the conditional logit model and using CMDS data, this paper explores the relationship between IRA and IMD, as well as the heterogeneity effect and influencing mechanism. The findings indicate that IRA reduces the probability of the floating population choosing the city, and the results are robust after considering endogeneity and further robustness test. The impact of IRA on IMD is heterogeneous. Relatively speaking, the floating population with high education levels, health, younger, unmarried, female, agricultural household registration, state-owned enterprises, and non-routine task work does not over-think the impact of IRA during the migration process. In addition, the floating population also considers geographical location, city size, marketization level, wage level, and environmental quality when making migration decisions. the mechanism test shows that IRA attracts or suppresses the floating population through factors such as wage levels, housing price level, difficulty in finding a job, etc., depending on the result of individual utility maximization. These insights reveal the complex interplay between technological advancements in robotics and labor migration, emphasizing the need for comprehensive policy frameworks to manage these transformations effectively.

Broadband Infrastructure and Happiness of Rural Households in China

Broadband Infrastructure and Happiness of Rural Households in China

The Driving Factors of Food Waste in Chinese Urban Households: A Qualitative Study Based on Grounded Theory

Food waste has become an increasingly common and serious global problem, affecting the guarantee of food security in China and the sustainable development of the national agricultural and food system. Urban households are the main source of food waste on the consumer side. Given China’s unique culture, economy, and social environment, the drivers of food waste in urban households need to consider broader social, psychological, and situational factors in order to provide a basis for formulating and implementing targeted policy measures. This article conducts a grounded theoretical analysis of semi-structured interview data from 56 urban households in China and constructs a driving factor model for food waste in urban households in the Chinese context. Research has found that the influencing factor system of food waste in Chinese urban households includes seven interrelated main categories. Among them, risk perception has a direct effect on responsibility awareness and behavioral tendencies, responsibility awareness and environmental pressure have a direct effect on behavioral tendencies, behavioral tendencies have a direct effect on behavioral choices, perception barriers play a moderating role in the impact of risk perception on responsibility awareness and behavioral tendencies, and behavioral constraints play a moderating role in the impact of behavioral tendencies on behavioral choices. This study enriches the research on the mechanism of food waste behavior in Chinese households, providing scientific basis for the formulation of intervention strategies for food waste in Chinese households, and also providing reference for revealing the mechanism of food waste behavior in other countries with similar cultural backgrounds.

A study of the Performance of Haier Smart under Digital Transformation

In recent years, the digital boom has continued to hit, and global scientific and technological innovation has been unprecedentedly intensive and active. On the cusp of this 5G trend, emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, cloud sharing, and big data are emerging in an endless stream, constantly impacting traditional technologies and the real economy. The fourth industrial revolution has quietly penetrated into every corner of society. Both people's lives and the economic environment have been unprecedentedly affected. As an important pillar industry in the national economic construction, how to meet the digital transformation, seize the opportunity of digital transformation, enhance product value, and create new quality productivity has become particularly important. This paper takes digital transformation as the starting point, explores the motivation and path of Haier's digital transformation in the past ten years, and evaluates its performance. The study found that Haier Smart Home's digital transformation has improved the long-term performance of enterprises; the first enlightenment is to accelerate the transformation and upgrading and improve the degree of digital attention ; second, adhere to innovation-driven, enhance digital R & D sales; third, create a digital platform to enhance the user's personalized experience. It is expected that the research in this paper can provide some reference for the digital transformation of other household appliance enterprises and bring some help to the digitization of China's household appliance manufacturing industry.

Being a householder speaking a foreign language: Foreign language proficiency and the internet technology adoption of the household

This study employs microdata from the China Labor-force Dynamics Survey to investigate the influence of foreign language proficiency on the adoption of Internet technology within households. The results indicate that householders who are proficient in foreign languages are more likely to adopt Internet technology at home than those who lack such knowledge. The greater the foreign language proficiency of the householder, the greater the likelihood of Internet technology adoption. Further analyses indicate that the positive effect of foreign language proficiency on the Internet technology adoption of the household in China is more pronounced in male-headed households, in urban areas, and in eastern and central regions. This study also identifies three potential mechanisms by which foreign language proficiency influences household Internet technology adoption: the information effect, the trust effect, and the income effect. These findings contribute to the understanding of the role of language proficiency in technology adoption at the household level, offer new insights into the positive outcomes of foreign language education in China, and encourage measures to reduce digital inequality among households through language learning.

Welfare enhancement or environment improvement: How does China's rural revitalization assistance policy work? Evidence from China

AbstractIn the context of sustainable development, the greatest challenge facing society today is to improve welfare of the disadvantaged while preserving the environment. This paper constructed a theoretical framework of “policy‐welfare‐environment,” explored the effects in terms of individual welfare enhancement and village environment improvement, and conduct empirical tests on a sample of 1208 rural households in China. The results show that: (1) The assistance policy can significantly improve the overall welfare of the disadvantaged groups, and meanwhile, it can improve different dimensions of welfare, with the degree from high to low was a social opportunity, spiritual feeling, and economic situation. (2) The assistance policy can increase the probability of adopting environmental protection behavior, which in turn can significantly improve the village environment. (3) Welfare improvements in social opportunities mediate between the assistance policy and village environment improvements, while improvements in spiritual feelings and economic status do not. In addition, there is age heterogeneity in the welfare enhancement effect of the policy in the economic status dimension and the spiritual feeling dimension. The conclusions provide valuable policy enlightenment for assistance policy formulation and environmental governance, and can protect the ecological environment while improving public welfare, which is in line with the trend of sustainable development.