The Impact and Mechanism of Digital Literacy on Farmers' Adoption of Green Production Technologies: An Empirical Analysis Based on CLES Mixed Cross-sectional Data

Promoting the adoption of green production technologies is a necessary way to achieve a comprehensive green transformation. Based on the mixed cross-section data of the 2020-2021 China Land Economy Survey (CLES), this paper empirically analyzes the influence mechanism of digital literacy on farmers' green production technology adoption behavior by using the ordinal Probit model and the mediating effect model. Endogeneity analysis and robustness tests were conducted using instrumental variable methods, conditional mixed process estimation methods, and double machine learning. The results show that: (1) Digital literacy has a significant positive impact on farmers' green production technology adoption behavior, and the marginal effect results show that the improvement of digital literacy prompts farmers to choose more green production behaviors. (2) Mechanism analysis shows that credit availability, green cognition, and social capital are important ways for digital literacy to influence the adoption of green production technologies. (3) Heterogeneity analysis show that for farmers with a high education level and small-scale planting, digital literacy had a more obvious effect on promoting their participation in green production behavior, but not for farmers with a low education level and large-scale planting. Based on this, it is recommended to improve the infrastructure of rural digital facilities, improve the level of digital literacy of rural households, enhance the availability of credit, strengthen green awareness, expand social capital, and improve the education level of rural households.