Does Smartphone Use Improve the Dietary Diversity of Rural Residents? Evidence from Household Survey Data from 5 Provinces

The use of smartphones has profoundly changed the consumption patterns and living conditions of rural residents, but there is little research on how smartphone use affects the food consumption patterns of rural residents. This paper uses survey data from 1047 farmers from five Chinese provinces in 2020 to investigate the impact of smartphone use on the dietary diversity of rural residents, the underlying mechanism, and the corresponding group-level heterogeneity. The study finds that smartphone use has a significantly positive effect on the dietary diversity of rural residents and that the dietary diversity scores of rural residents who use smartphones to access the internet are a significant 4.2% higher than those of rural residents who do not. The results are robust to the use of instrumental variables and propensity score matching to account for potential endogeneity. The income effect and the transaction cost effect are the two mechanisms by which smartphone use improves the dietary diversity of rural residents. Compared with elderly residents and members of low-income households, young and middle-aged people and members of high-income households are more likely to use smartphones to improve their dietary diversity. The following recommendations for further improving the dietary diversity of rural residents are made: continue to increase the internet penetration rate and smartphone coverage rate in rural areas, conduct public welfare lectures on smartphone usage and nutrition and health knowledge, and improve the e-commerce distribution infrastructure in rural areas.