Do ICTs Boost Agricultural Productivity?

Based on panel data from the Rural Fixed Point Survey of the Ministry of Agriculture over the period 2004-2016 and supplementary survey data on information and communications technology(ICT) applications in the countryside, this paper employs the difference in differences(DID) method to analyze the effects of ICT applications on rural households’ agricultural total factor productivity(TFP) with mobile phone signal, internet and 3G mobile network connections as indicators, and decomposes and evaluates the constituent factors. Our findings reveal a positive effect of ICTs on rural households’ TFP, which primarily stemmed from rising agricultural technical efficiency. However, ICTs exerted no significant effect on agricultural technical progress during this paper’s data period due to limited rural human capital. These findings are consistent with robustness test results based on counterfactual and matching methods.