How digital embeddedness affects the poverty vulnerability of rural households?

Abstract The advancement and widespread adoption of digital technology have opened up new avenues for reducing poverty vulnerability among rural households. Drawing on data from the 2020 and 2022 waves of the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this study constructs an individual-level digital embeddedness index to assess its effect on the vulnerability to poverty among rural households. The findings suggest that digital embeddedness significantly alleviates poverty vulnerability, with this effect becoming more pronounced as the relative poverty threshold increases. A mechanism analysis further reveals that, in terms of risk shocks, digital embeddedness mitigates their impact by enhancing agricultural income and promoting off-farm employment opportunities. Regarding risk response, digital embeddedness strengthens households’ coping capacity by fostering social capital accumulation and improving access to financial resources. Moreover, the impact of digital embeddedness on poverty vulnerability is heterogeneous across education levels. Households where the head has attained at least a junior high school education experience a more pronounced poverty-alleviating effect. The impact of digital embeddedness also differs by its components: the strongest influence arises from digital productive practice embeddedness, followed by digital lifestyle embeddedness, whereas digital value cognition embeddedness exerts the weakest effect. Based on these findings, the study offers policy recommendations aimed at further alleviating poverty vulnerability among rural households.