Social Capital and Digital Divide: Implications for Mobile Health Policy in Developing Countries

Digital divide has been a major obstacle for mobile health services for the elderly in developing countries; to assess the potential solution to narrow digital divide among the elderly, we use data from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) and test for a causal role of social capital in digital access among elderly individuals in China. To handle endogenous problems associated with social capital, we introduce instrumental variable (IV) estimates in our models. Our data analysis shows that social capital facilitates increased digital access. We distinguish between two digital access patterns, an infrastructure pattern and a personal device pattern, and find that the causal effect of social capital is determined by the personal device pattern. Therefore, since family members and relatives increase digital access among elderly people, we propose a family-centered mobile health policy in developing countries.