互联网使用与家庭文旅消费——兼论互联网普及下居民消费升级的可行性

经济新常态下,互联网普及推动了消费方式的系统性变革。文章基于中国家庭追踪调查数据(CFPS),实证检验了互联网使用对家庭文旅消费的影响。研究结果表明:(1)互联网使用显著提升了家庭文旅消费概率和水平,并且在克服潜在的内生性问题后,其影响效应保持稳健。(2)进一步分析发现,互联网使用对家庭文旅消费的促进作用来源于信息渠道效应和便捷交易效应,而受教育水平和收入水平的增加有利于增强互联网使用的影响效果。(3)分地区异质性分析显示,在中西部地区、低互联网普及率地区、高景区拥有量地区,互联网使用对家庭文旅消费的促进作用更为明显。(4)拓展分析还发现,互联网使用没有影响家庭在必需品消费方面的支出比重,但却带来以文旅消费为代表的服务消费水平和比重的显著提升,继而有助于家庭扩大消费支出,并促进消费结构的服务化转型。上述结论不仅为理解中国家庭消费行为提供了新的视角,也为合理利用互联网激发消费潜能提供了有益参考。

Internet Use and Household Culture and Tourism Consumption:A Study on the Role of the Wide-spread Use of the Internet on Promoting Consumption Upgrading in China

Under the new normal conditions, the economic growth mode featuring high levels of investment and large volume of exports becomes unsustainable. Strengthening the fundamental role of consumption in driving economic growth is of great significance for China’s sustainable economic development. As an important part of household consumption, spending in culture and tourism is a major manifestation of people’s pursuit of a better life. Nowadays, the wide-spread use of the Internet has brought profound changes to Chinese people’s consumption ways. However, there is few studies on the role of Internet use on household culture and tourism consumption from a micro perspective.Based on the research status and practical needs, this paper employs the data from China Family Panel Studies(CFPS) to examine the impact of Internet use on China’s household culture and tourism consumption in theoretical and empirical terms, with a view to providing a basis for fostering new drivers of consumption growth. First, the results of this study show that Internet use can significantly promote the household culture and tourism consumption, and this effect still exists when the impact of household consumption habits is taken into consideration. Based on this, this paper uses propensity score matching method(PSM) and conditional mixed process estimation method(CMP) to overcome the potential endogeneity of the model, and the result is consistent with the previous findings. Second,mechanism analysis shows that Internet use can increase the level of household culture and tourism consumption by providing information channels and facilitating fast transactions. Further study finds that due to differences in information processing capabilities and product transaction requirements,high-education level and high-income level can make the positive effect of Internet use stronger. Third,the region-specific heterogeneity analysis shows that in the central and western regions, regions with low Internet penetration rate, and regions with many attractions, Internet use plays a bigger role in promoting household culture and tourism consumption. Fourth, although Internet use leads to an increase in people’s overall consumption, it shows a kind of exclusivity in terms of affecting the mix of consumption expenditures. That means Internet use positively affects the proportion of spending on services in the households’ total consumption, but does not significantly affect the proportion of consumption of necessities, which will promote a“service-oriented”transformation of the household consumption structure and drive forward the consumption upgrading.This paper will have the following possible marginal contributions. Firstly, existing literature mainly explores the impact of Internet use on household general consumption, while few studies examine its impact on high-demand elastic consumption such as culture and tourism consumption. This paper, therefore, broadens the research horizon in this field by introducing the factor of Internet use into the analysis framework of household culture and tourism consumption. Secondly, this paper discusses the mechanism of Internet use on household culture and tourism consumption, and focuses on the moderating effect of education level and income level on the relationship between Internet use and such consumption. In addition, this paper finds that the expansion of culture and tourism consumption caused by Internet use has effectively improved the overall household consumption level and promoted the“service-oriented”transformation of the household consumption structure. Thirdly, this paper reaches highly reliable conclusions by using a two-part model to solve the estimation error which is caused by the sample distribution, and using the PSM method and the CMP method to overcome the problem of potential endogeneity.