Does Internet use reduce chemical fertilizer use? Evidence from rural households in China
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Does Internet use reduce chemical fertilizer use? Evidence from rural households in China Fang Yuan 1 & Kai Tang 2
&
Qinghua Shi 3
Received: 27 April 2020 / Accepted: 20 September 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Although numerous studies have explored various impacts of Internet use, few have investigated the linkage between Internet use and chemical fertilizer use in developing economies. This study examines the influences of Internet use and related promotion policy on chemical fertilizer use based on a nationwide dataset including China’s 7766 rural households. The baseline regression results show that Internet use reduced chemical fertilizer use significantly. The mechanism analysis unveils the mediation role of human capital; Internet use increased farmers’ human capital and then reduced chemical fertilizer use. In addition, the differencein-difference method is employed to examine the effects of Internet promotion policy and the findings reveal that the promotion policy could help reduce farmers’ use of chemical fertilizer. Finally, both propensity score matching-DID model and a two-stage instrumental variable model are used to address potential endogeneity issues associated with Internet use, and results indicate that the empirical results are robust. Our findings suggest that improving the availability of broadband access in a rural area, promoting Internet-related training and education, and more government’s investment in rural ICTs infrastructure can contribute to the reduction of chemical fertilizer use. Keywords Internet use . Chemical fertilizer use reduction . Human capital . DID . PSM-DID . China
Introduction For developing economies, one of the greatest challenges facing their communities is to provide enough food for the rapid growth population (Reganold and Wachter 2016; Tang et al. 2018, 2020c; Wu et al. 2019; Tang and Hailu 2020). Accordingly, various measures, especially applying more chemical fertilizer, have been widely taken in many developing economies to increase food supply and meet the booming Fang Yuan and Kai Tang are co-first authors. Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Kai Tang [email protected] 1
School of Business & Leadership Empowerment and Organization Development Research Center, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510006, China
2
School of Economics and Trade, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou 510006, China
3
Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai 200030, China
demand in the last several decades (Tang et al. 2016a, 2019; Xiang et al. 2020). Nevertheless, chemical fertilizer used in the agricultural sector is the key source of water polluters in those regions. For example, agricultural fertilizer use is the largest generator of chemical oxygen demand (COD) in China, causing billions of USD of losses annually (Tang et al. 2016a, 2020a). Excessive use of chemical fertilizer is the main cause of groundwater contamination
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