Agricultural green development policy and agricultural export upgrading: evidence from China’s agricultural product trade
Abstract
How production-side agricultural green development policy affects agricultural exports remains insufficiently understood, particularly across the three distinct trade margins of export value, export volume, and export quality. Using China’s 2017 agricultural green development policy as a policy shock, this study employs panel data for 31 provincial-level regions from 2013 to 2024, measures pre-policy conditions using agricultural sustainability over 2013–2016, and applies a continuous difference-in-differences design to identify heterogeneous provincial export responses to the common policy shock. The results show that, following policy implementation, regions with higher pre-policy agricultural sustainability experienced larger relative increases in export value, export volume, and export quality, indicating that the policy response was not confined to either quality improvement or scale expansion alone. Dynamic estimates show that the positive differential in export quality emerged early in the implementation period, whereas export value and export volume adjusted more gradually. Robustness checks, counterfactual policy-timing tests, random permutation tests, and cluster-aware double machine learning estimates broadly corroborate the core findings. Among the three outcomes, the evidence is most stable for export quality, whereas export volume is estimated with relatively lower precision. Spatial analysis shows positive local direct effects across all three export dimensions. No stable significant cross-province indirect effects are found for export value or export volume, whereas export quality exhibits a statistically significant negative cross-province spatial association. Overall, the export adjustment associated with agricultural green development policy is characterized by multidimensional improvement, asynchronous adjustment, and limited spatial transmission, extending research on agricultural green development from domestic production and resource-environmental performance to international trade outcomes.