Impact of ICT adoption on household consumption: evidence from apple growers in China

In the digital era, information and communication technologies (ICT) adoption re-shaped the specific context of agricultural production and off-farm employment, which influenced household consumption. However, few studies emphasized the impact of ICT adoption on household consumption, and the influencing mechanism of ICT adoption on household consumption needed to be deeply analyzed. Thus, the data set that consisted of 1075 effective samples was used to analyze the impact of ICT adoption on household consumption. The results indicated that compared with farmers without adopting personal computers, household consumption expenditures and developmental consumption expenditures for farmers with adopting personal computers were significantly increased by 23.86% and 45.64%, respectively. Further, ICT adoption led to the growth in household consumption expenditures by means of increasing household income and facilitating the adoption of formulated fertilization technologies. This study was conducive to understanding the sophisticated mechanism of ICT adoption on household consumption.