ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Environ. Sci.
Sec. Environmental Policy and Governance
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fenvs.2025.1611339
This article is part of the Research TopicMoving Towards Sustainable Development: Exploring the Impact of Land-Use Policies on Land Green Utilization EfficiencyView all 15 articles
Digital rural construction and agricultural green total factor productivity: The role of land finance, land resource misallocation, and agricultural technology innovation
Provisionally accepted- 1Department of Law, Dongguk University, Seoul 04620, Republic of Korea
- 2Nanchang Hangkong University, Nanchang 330063, China
- 3Department of Business Administration, Jeonbuk National University, Jeonju 54896, Republic of Korea
- 4School of Accounting, Guangzhou College of Commerce, Guangzhou, China
- 5Faculty of Finance, City university of Macau, Macau 999078, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
Prior studies on whether and how digital rural construction (DRC) contributes to enhancing agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP) remain limited. This study uses Difference-in-Differences method and panel data comprising 18,543 observations from 2,128 counties (districts) between 2012 and 2022 to examine the impact of DRC on AGTFP and its underlying mechanisms. The findings indicate that DRC significantly boosts AGTFP, a result that holds after conducting several robustness checks and endogeneity test, including replacing the dependent variable, excluding other policy impacts, adjusting the sample period, and propensity score matching method. The mechanisms through which DRC enhances AGTFP include improving land finance, alleviating land resource misallocation, and fostering agricultural technology innovation. The effects of DRC on AGTFP are notably more pronounced in the central and western regions of China, non-major grain-producing areas, and regions with lower land transfer efficiency. Our insights clarify the influence pathways through which DRC facilitates the enhancement of AGTFP, offering fresh theoretical insights and practical implications for further guiding DRC and leveraging the efficiency of AGTFP.
Keywords: digital rural construction, Agricultural green total factor productivity, Land finance, Land resource misallocation, Technology innovation
Received: 14 Apr 2025; Accepted: 10 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Hu and Shen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Pin Shen, School of Accounting, Guangzhou College of Commerce, Guangzhou, 511363, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.