Impact of Internet use on economic well‐being of rural households: Evidence from China

The expansion of the Internet in developing countries has important implications for the economic development of rural areas. Although many studies have investigated various benefits of Internet use, little attention has been paid to find the relationship between Internet use and the economic well‐being of rural households. This paper, therefore, investigates the effects of Internet use on household income and expenditure, using a sample of rural households from China. Both endogenous treatment regression (ETR) and unconditional quantile regression (UQR) techniques are used to identify the homogenous and heterogeneous effects of Internet use, respectively. The ETR results show that Internet use increases household income and expenditure significantly. However, the UQR results reveal that Internet use has a larger impact at the upper distributions of household income and expenditure.