Can agricultural technological progress promote China’s interprovincial rural revitalization? an analytical perspective based on agricultural-scale operations

Abstract

To clarify the role of agricultural technological progress in the process of rural revitalization, this paper uses the agricultural panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2007 to 2020 to measure the Total Factor Productivity of agriculture, analyzes the impact direction and spatial spillover effect of agricultural technological progress on China’s rural revitalization through the spatial Durbin model, and analyzes the threshold mechanism of agricultural technological progress on China’s rural revitalization by using the panel threshold model. The results are as follows: (1) The spatial and geographical agglomeration of interprovincial rural revitalization in China has gradually weakened, and the regional imbalance has improved; (2) The progress in agricultural technology plays a positive role in promoting China’s interprovincial rural revitalization, and the overall nonlinear characteristics of "first inhibiting and then promoting" are presented, and the conclusion is still robust after fully considering the factors of time, region and economic distance; (3) Further analysis shows that the impact of agricultural technological progress on China’s interprovincial rural revitalization is based on the threshold constraints of land-scale operation and agricultural-industry agglomeration, and shows significant spatial heterogeneity. The inherent reason is that whether the land-scale operation entity adopts long-term investment decisions such as new agricultural technology depends on the expectation of land management risk stability, while agricultural-industry agglomeration hinders the diffusion and spillover of agricultural technology due to the exclusive characteristics of agricultural production geographical locations. Therefore, in the future of China’s rural revitalization, the government should guide the large-scale operation of land and agricultural production according to local conditions to give full play to the positive spillover effect and spatial radiation capacity of agricultural technology.