The impact of digital finance on farmers'adoption of green production technologies

Abstract

With the development of the Internet, informatization, and digitalization, the emerging financial service model represented by digital finance has significant advantages in easing farmers' borrowing and information constraints and improving risk sharing, and plays an important role in farmers'adoption of green production technologies. Based on the micro survey data of grain producers in Shaanxi Province, this study used the coefficient of variation method to measure the degree of adoption of green production technologies by farmers, and used the endogenous transformation regression model to empirically analyze the effect of the use of digital finance on the degree of adoption of green production technologies by farmers and mechanism through building a counterfactual framework. The study found that: (1) The use of digital finance can significantly improve the adoption degree of green production technologies by farmers. Specifically, under the counterfactual hypothesis, the adoption degree of green production technologies by farmers who use digital finance will decrease by 14.6% if they do not use digital finance. If farmers who have not used digital finance use digital finance, their adoption of green production technologies will increase by 22.2%. (2) Heterogeneity analysis showed that the deeper the use of digital finance, the greater the promotion effect on farmers'adoption of green production technologies; Digital finance has a greater effect on the adoption of green production technologies by farmers with higher education level, lower household income, and larger planting area. (3) Mechanism analysis showed that digital finance can promote farmers'adoption of green production technologies by improving the availability of credit and information and risk sharing level. The conclusions of this study can contribute to providing a new perspective and path for the promotion of agricultural green production technologies.