Impact of Rural E-Commerce Participation on Farmers’ Household Development Resilience: Evidence from 1229 Farmers in China

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of e-commerce participation on household development resilience using a sample of 1229 households in the Shandong and Shaanxi provinces of China in 2022. It constructs the developmental resilience index of farm households from three dimensions of economy, society and culture using the entropy method, and establishes a counterfactual framework using the Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method. The results suggest that participation in e-commerce has a significant and positive impact on farming household development resilience. The PSM method estimates that participation in e-commerce increases the developmental resilience of farming households by 9.63% compared to non-participation, with economic, social, and cultural resilience increasing by 9.29%, 9.84%, and 9.92%, respectively. The robustness test results confirm the findings. Further analysis reveals that participation in e-commerce enhances farm household development resilience through three mechanisms: improving economic efficiency, network relationship linkage, and risk appetite. Heterogeneity analysis shows that the impact of e-commerce participation on household development resilience varies among farmers with different endowment constraints. In particular, farmers with more years of education and cooperative members benefit more from e-commerce participation, especially live and platform e-commerce.