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Does agricultural fiscal policy improve green development in China’s agriculture sector? Evidence from energy and environmental perspectives

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Abstract

Green development is of great practical significance to China's sustainable agricultural development. This study aims to evaluate the green development level in China’s agricultural sector and explore the influencing factors of agricultural green development. Based on the data of China’s 30 provinces from 2000 to 2015, we construct the green unified efficiency index by using the non-radial directional distance function method to measure the agricultural green development level, then use the Malmquist decomposition method to explore its dynamic change. Further, we employ the panel threshold regression model to estimate the effects of fiscal expenditure on agricultural green development. The results show that China was staying at a low level of agricultural green development, and extinct regional disparities were found within the sample period. Besides, the impact of fiscal expenditure on agricultural green development had a significant threshold effect with respect to agricultural GDP. Other control factors, including agriculture structure, price of production material, mechanization level, and chemical fertilizer also had significant impacts on the green unified efficiency index. Based on these findings, political suggestions are provided to promote green development in China’s agricultural sector.

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Funding

This research is supported by the General Research Project of Department of Education in Zhejiang Province (Y202248437), Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Sciences Planning Project (23YJRC14ZD-1YB), and URC scientific research project (URC202207).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Business School, Shaoxing University, Shaoxing, 312000, Zhejiang, People’s Republic of China

    Xiaoli Wu

  2. Institute of Finance and Economics, School of Urban and Regional Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, People’s Republic of China

    Mengyuan Xie

  3. School of Economics, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, Hubei, People’s Republic of China

    Shaojun Xu & Rilong Fei

  4. School of Economics, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, 430073, Hubei, People’s Republic of China

    An Pan

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  1. Xiaoli Wu
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Contributions

Conceptualization: XW, RF; Methodology: XW, MX, RF, AP; Formal analysis and investigation: MX, XW; Writing—original draft preparation: MX; Writing—review and editing: MX, SX; Funding acquisition: XW, RF; Resources: XW, RF; Supervision: AP.

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Correspondence to Mengyuan Xie.

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Wu, X., Xie, M., Xu, S. et al. Does agricultural fiscal policy improve green development in China’s agriculture sector? Evidence from energy and environmental perspectives. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-04770-8

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