ICT Adoption, Individual Income and Psychological Health of Rural Farmers in China
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ICT Adoption, Individual Income and Psychological Health of Rural Farmers in China Zhongkun Zhu 1 & Wanglin Ma 2
& Chenxin
Leng 3
Received: 15 August 2020 / Accepted: 19 October 2020/ # The International Society for Quality-of-Life Studies (ISQOLS) and Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper examines the joint effects of the adoption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and individual income on farmers’ psychological health, measured by happiness, life satisfaction, stress and loneliness. We employ a twostage residual inclusion approach combined with a conditional mixed process model to analyse data collected from 7065 rural households in China. The econometric strategy addresses the potential endogeneity issues of ICT adoption and individual income and captures the possible interdependence between the two variables. The empirical findings reveal that both ICT adoption and high individual income are significantly associated with higher levels of happiness and life satisfaction, but are significantly associated with lower levels of stress and loneliness. Further analysis reveals that there exists a positive interaction effect between farmers’ decision to adopt ICTs and their income. Keywords ICT adoption . Income . Psychological health . Two-stage residual inclusion .
Rural China JEL Codes L86 . D31 . I31
* Wanglin Ma [email protected] Zhongkun Zhu [email protected] Chenxin Leng [email protected]
1
National School of Development, Peking University, No.5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100871, China
2
Department of Global Value Chains and Trade, Faculty of Agribusiness and Commerce, Lincoln University, PO Box 85084, Lincoln, Christchurch 7647, New Zealand
3
China Institute for Rural Studies, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China
Z. Zhu et al.
Introduction Psychological health refers to people’s cognitive and emotional evaluations of their lives, which includes positive subjective wellbeing such as happiness and life satisfaction and negative emotions such as stress and loneliness (Vaillant et al. 2006). Previous studies have indicated that positive psychological health outcomes such as happiness can contribute to collaborations between co-workers (Johnson and Acabchuk 2018), promote employees’ curiosity, creativity, and innovation (Jovanovic and Brdaric 2012), and motivate people to succeed at work and to persist with efforts to achieve their goals (Böckerman and Ilmakunnas 2012; Diener et al. 2002). Besides, workers who have higher life satisfaction are more likely to be healthy and productive because healthier workers usually take fewer sick leaves (Tay 2013). In comparison, the negative psychological health outcomes such as stress and loneliness arising from both work and life activities can reduce work productivity, damage physical health, and disrupt social harmony (Chen et al. 2009; Hoang et al. 2019; Rohde et al. 2016). Therefore, it is essential to understand the constraints and incentives that affect people’s psychological health for better designing po
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