Digital economy empowering agricultural economic resilience: evidence from China

Abstract

Enhancing agricultural economic resilience is a crucial foundation for ensuring national food security and promoting high-quality agricultural development. Based on panel data from 282 prefecture-level cities in China, this paper constructs an evaluation index system for agricultural economic resilience and empirically examines the impact and underlying mechanisms of the digital economy on agricultural economic resilience using econometric methods. The results show that: ① The results show that the digital economy is significantly positively associated with the level of agricultural economic resilience. This conclusion remains valid after addressing endogeneity issues using the 2SLS and system GMM models, as well as conducting various robustness tests. ② Heterogeneity analysis reveals that, compared with the central and western regions and the grain production-marketing balance areas, the digital economy has a more pronounced effect on enhancing agricultural economic resilience in the eastern region, as well as in major grain-producing and main grain-marketing areas. ③ Mechanism analysis indicates that agricultural industry agglomeration and agricultural industrial structure upgrading are important pathways linking the digital economy with agricultural economic resilience. ④ The digital economy shows a significantly positive spatial correlation with agricultural economic resilience in neighboring regions. The development of the local digital economy can generate a radiating and driving effect on the agricultural economic resilience of neighboring regions. This study not only enriches the theoretical research framework of the digital economy and agricultural economic resilience but also provides empirical evidence and decision-making references for tailoring digital agriculture development policies to local conditions, establishing a regionally coordinated agricultural risk prevention and control system, and comprehensively enhancing the national capacity to guarantee food security.