Facing the dual constraints of resource endowment and ecological environment, how to improve green total factor productivity (GTFP) in agriculture and promote a comprehensive green transformation of agricultural development has become an important proposition for modernizing China’s agricultural production mode. Digitalization is an important trend in modern agricultural development, and also a new driving force for promoting green agricultural development. At present, although existing literature has examined the impact of digitalization on agricultural green development from the perspective of GTFP, the conclusions are not yet consistent, and few studies have explored the mediating role of factor allocation between the two, as well as the moderating effect of regional digital divides on their relationship.
Using provincial panel data from 2000 to 2022, this paper empirically examines the impact of digitalization on agricultural green development and its mechanism, and discusses the moderating role of the digital divide in the relationship between the two. The results show that digitalization significantly promotes agricultural green development, and its empowering effect is mainly reflected in promoting agricultural green technological progress, while its influence on agricultural green technical efficiency and green scale efficiency is limited. Mechanism tests indicate that digitalization primarily enhances agricultural green development by alleviating the degree of misallocation of labor and land factors, whereas the channel of promoting agricultural green development by alleviating capital factor misallocation remains to be further unblocked. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the promoting effect of digitalization on agricultural green development exhibits a “Matthew effect”—its impact is significantly stronger in high-quantile regions compared to low-quantile regions. Additionally, the empowering effect is more pronounced in eastern regions and provinces with higher degree of land scale and rural human capital levels. Moderating effect tests find that both the access divide and the usage divide play a negatively moderating role in the process of digitalization empowering agricultural green development. Once the digital divide is bridged, digitalization exhibits a stronger promoting effect on agricultural green development.
Compared with existing research, this study makes expansions in the following aspects. First, existing literature focuses on examining the direct impact of digitalization on agricultural green development, and the mechanistic “black box” remains not fully opened. This paper explores the influence mechanism of digitalization on agricultural green development from the perspective of factor misallocation, and uses a causal mediation effect model to reveal the relative importance of different factor misallocations in the causal mechanism, opening the mechanism black box of this causal chain, and providing a theoretical perspective for subsequent research. Second, existing studies rarely consider the existing digital divide problem, let alone a detailed examination of its moderating role in the relationship between digitalization and agricultural green development. This study measures provincial digital divides using the relative gap approach, and clarifies the negative moderating effect of the digital divide on the relationship between digitalization and agricultural green development from the two aspects of “access divide” and “usage divide,” revealing that the expansion of the digital divide will exacerbate regional imbalances in agricultural green development, offering a new perspective for understanding the “inclusiveness” problem in digital economic development.
This paper systematically analyzes the influence mechanism and heterogeneous effects of digitalization empowering agricultural green development, which not only theoretically enriches the economic consequences and mechanism of agricultural digital transformation, but also provides policy targets for better leveraging the empowering role of agricultural digitalization and solving the problems of factor misallocation and digital divide in agricultural green development.
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