Does digital literacy affect the happiness of rural residents? Evidence from China

Yi DingJunnan Zhang^*

• Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, China

This study provides a systematic examination of the impact of digital literacy on the happiness of rural Chinese residents, the underlying mechanisms, and the heterogeneous effects across dimensions such as gender, age,and education. Using data from the 2022 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS 2022), we employ an ordinary least squares (OLS) model for baseline estimation and conduct robustness, endogeneity, heterogeneity, and mechanism tests to ensure the reliability of our conclusions. The results show that digital literacy significantly enhances rural residents' subjective well-being, a finding that holds after multiple robustness and endogeneity checks. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the marginal effect of digital literacy is stronger in middle-aged and older groups than in younger groups, in males than in females, in non-eastern regions than in eastern regions, and in individuals with lower education than in those with higher education. Dimensional analysis indicates that digital work literacy has the greatest impact on happiness, while digital life literacy has the smallest. Mechanism tests show that digital literacy mainly improves happiness through increasing social trust and subjective income perception. The policy implications are clear: relevant stakeholders should enhance rural residents' digital literacy through improving digital infrastructure and targeted digital skills training to achieve long-term growth in rural subjective well-being. The marginal contributions of this paper are threefold: first, we expand digital literacy into four dimensions—digital learning, digital socializing, digital working, and digital living—and empirically test their effects on farmers' happiness; second, we uncover the causal mechanisms and group-specific differences of digital literacy on happiness, providing evidence-based guidance for grassroots policy-making; third, by focusing on rural China, we add to the literature on happiness among digital-vulnerable groups in developing countries.