ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1595161
Bridging the Divide: How Agricultural Technological Innovation Narrows the Urban-Rural Income Gap in China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Guangxi Minzu University, Guangxi, China
- 2Shandong Women's University, Jinan, Shandong, China
- 3Shandong University of Finance and Economics, Jinan, Shandong Province, China
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Agricultural modernization and sustainable development face significant challenges from persistent urban-rural income disparities, which constrain agricultural transformation and rural revitalization. This paper investigates the comprehensive impact mechanism of agricultural technological innovation on urban-rural income disparities through a multi-dimensional analytical framework integrating productivity enhancement, structural transformation, and spatial heterogeneity effects. Using panel data from 280 Chinese cities during 2008-2021, our integrated analysis reveals that agricultural technological innovation serves as a fundamental driver for narrowing urban-rural income gaps through interconnected pathways of employment structure optimization, factor allocation improvement, and production efficiency enhancement. The findings demonstrate that agricultural technological innovation effectively reduces the urban-rural income gap, with invention patents showing particularly significant effects. Heterogeneity analysis indicates stronger effects in eastern and western regions, and in cities with higher administrative levels, greater innovation vitality, stronger intellectual property protection, and better information accessibility. The empirical evidence reveals non-linear threshold effects, where innovation impact strengthens systematically as urbanization rates, education attention, and information accessibility increase, forming a cohesive framework for understanding innovationdriven rural development. Policy recommendations include strengthening agricultural technological innovation support, optimizing rural labor structure, promoting urbanization and information infrastructure development, and enhancing policy coordination.
Keywords: Agricultural Technological Innovation, urban-rural income gap, Employment structure, Resources allocation, productivity
Received: 17 Mar 2025; Accepted: 10 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liao, Wei, Bai and Liu. 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: Yu Bai, Shandong Women's University, Jinan, Shandong, China
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