Connecting the Countryside Via E-Commerce: Evidence from China

2018

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper estimates the impact of the first nation-wide e-commerce expansion program on rural households. To do so, we combine a randomized control trial with new survey and administrative microdata. In contrast to existing case studies, we find little evidence for income gains to rural producers and workers. Instead, the gains are driven by a reduction in cost of living for a minority of rural households who tend to be younger, richer and in more remote markets. These effects are mainly due to overcoming logistical barriers to e-commerce, rather than to additional investments to adapt e-commerce to the rural population.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Media Technology, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc40063bbebe04718f7882730ab0517d8da8c241

Citations in the corpus

• The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa (2019, unknown): “The connected and unconnected parts of 10 × 10 km grid-cells, however, often do. Note that δ j(i) × Connected i is shorthand in (1) in the sense that we interact δ j(i) both with the Connected i dummy and the converse dummy for not being connected. 30 Online Appendix Table A1 lists when the countrie”