ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1649953
Digital Factors Spur Rural Industrial Integration: Mediating Roles of Rural Entrepreneurship and Agricultural Innovation in China
Provisionally accepted
- Anhui University of Technology, Ma'anshan, China
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Using a balanced panel dataset comprising observations from 30 Chinese provinces over the period 2013-2021, we analyze a structured sample encompassing agricultural professional cooperatives, family farms, new professional farmers, agricultural enterprises, and ordinary farmers. We utilize a mediation model to identify the channels through which digital factors facilitate rural industrial integration (RI), emphasizing rural entrepreneurship and agricultural innovation. Our analysis demonstrates that digital factors significantly enhances RI, notably in China's central region and major grain-producing areas. We highlight rural entrepreneurship and agricultural innovation as crucial mediators, with regional disparities in their relative importance. Specifically, rural entrepreneurship exerts a stronger mediating influence in eastern regions and non-major grain-producing areas, while agricultural innovation plays a dominant mediating role in central and major grain-producing regions. Our findings advocate for intensified digital integration within rural economies, targeted enhancements in agricultural innovation, and strengthened entrepreneurial ecosystems to further elevate RI.
Keywords: Digital factors, Rural industrial integration, Rural entrepreneurship, Agricultural innovation, Regional development disparities
Received: 19 Jun 2025; Accepted: 01 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jia and Zhu. 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: Tingting Zhu, Anhui University of Technology, Ma'anshan, China
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