Does internet use make farmers happier? Evidence from Indonesia

Abstract

AbstractThe literature on the role of Internet use on subjective well-being has grown over the years. However, evidence on how Internet use affects farmers’ subjective well-being (happiness and life satisfaction) remains scarce. This research fills the gap by analyzing the effects of Internet use on farmers’ subjective well-being. This study provides two essential contributions. First, we provide novel empirical evidence on the association between Internet use and farmers’ subjective well-being. Second, we employ national representative data from Indonesia, consisting of 7221 urban and rural farmers. A two-stage residual inclusion (2SRI) strategy was used to tackle the endogeneity problems in the decisions to use the Internet. The finding indicates that Internet use positively and significantly affects farmers’ happiness and life satisfaction. The disaggregate analysis also reveals that Internet use positively and significantly affects happiness at income quintiles 1 and 3. However, the effect of Internet use on life satisfaction was only significant at the lowest income (farmers’ income quintile 1). Our study suggests developing Internet use in agricultural sectors to boost farmers’ subjective well-being.

Keywords

• 2SRI
• internet use
• farmers
• happiness
• life satisfaction
• subjective well-being