The Effects of Agricultural Digitalization Empowering Agricultural New Quality Productive Forces

Under the strategic background of comprehensively promoting rural revitalization and accelerating the construction of a strong agricultural country, the development of new quality productive forces in agriculture has become a key path to promote the transformation of agricultural modernization. Based on the establishment of the evaluation index system for agricultural digitalization and agricultural new quality productive forces, this study utilizes the panel data of 30 provinces and cities in China from 2012 to 2022 to systematically examine the impact mechanism of agricultural digitization on new quality productive forces in agriculture through bidirectional fixed- effect model and threshold regression analysis. The findings reveals that during the study period， the development levels of agricultural new quality productive forces and agricultural digitization of each province （city） shows a with steady growth trend， indicating the evident policy effects. But the overall development levels of the two are still in a relatively low stage. Notably， the development levels of agricultural new quality productive forces and agricultural digitization in eastern regions demonstrate a “dual-high”agglomeration pattern and were significantly higher than those in other regions， reflecting obvious regional imbalance. Regression results indicate that the development of agricultural digitization in China has a significant positive impact on the agricultural new quality productive forces， and the three dimensions of agricultural digital development environment， agricultural digital infrastructure and agricultural digital industrialization have a significant role in promoting the improvement of agricultural new quality productive forces. The structure of human capital and the upgrading of rural industrial structure are conducive to the development of agricultural new quality productive forces， whereas the aging of the rural population has the opposite effect. These results pass robustness tests. Heterogeneity analysis indicates the promotion effect of agricultural digitization on agricultural new quality productive forces has obvious regional differences， and the influence intensity in central regions is significantly higher than that in eastern and western areas. Further threshold test reveals that there is a single-threshold characteristic on the promotion of agricultural new quality productive forces by agricultural digitization. When the development level of agricultural digitization exceeds a certain threshold， its marginal promotion effect is significantly increased， indicating that the effect of agricultural digitization on agricultural new quality productive forces is increased with the development stage. Accordingly， policy recommendations are proposed from the aspects of deepening the application and promotion of agricultural digitization， overcoming initial integration barriers between agriculture and digital technology， and implementing region-specific strategies.