Abstract:

Enhancing the employment quality of the rural labor force serves as a micro-level lever for achieving common prosperity, while digital literacy acts as a pivotal enabling factor in the digital era. Drawing on theoretical analysis and utilizing data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper empirically investigates the impact of digital literacy on the employment quality of rural laborers and its underlying mechanisms. The results show that digital literacy exerts a significant positive effect on employment quality, with improvements in digital literacy effectively promoting better employment outcomes. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that, at the micro level, the benefits of digital literacy are more pronounced among youth aged 16-35, workers engaged in non–agricultural sectors, and non-entrepreneurial households. At the macro level, the positive influence of digital literacy is stronger in regions with advanced digital village development and in the eastern and central parts of China. Further mechanism analysis identifies the expansion of social networks and enhanced credit accessibility as key channels through which digital literacy improves employment quality. In addition, the effect of digital literacy exhibits significant heterogeneity across different quantiles of the employment quality distribution.

Key words:

digital literacy, rural labor force, quality of employment, digital villages

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