Healthy diet choices: does internet use help promote healthy food consumption in Indonesia?

Abstract

This study examines the impact of Internet use on healthy food consumption, captured by the share of healthy food expenditure in total household food expenditure. The inverse probability weighted regression adjustment and Tobit models combined with the Lewbel approach help address the selection bias issues and estimate data of 334,229 households collected by the National Economics Survey in Indonesia. The results show that Internet use significantly reduces household healthy food consumption, and the effect on rural households is larger than that on urban households. Internet use diversity, measured by the number of Internet activities and services people access, also significantly reduces healthy food consumption. The disaggregated analyses reveal that with incomes increasing from low (quartile 1) to high (quartile 4), the impacts of Internet use on healthy food consumption for urban households become positive at quartile 2 and the effects increase monotonously. In comparison, the impacts of Internet use on healthy food consumption for rural households are negative at the different income quartiles.