数字乡村建设对粮食生产韧性的影响 基于30个中国省份面板数据的阈值效应分析

Abstract

Ensuring resilient grain production is essential for food availability, price stability, and nutrition security under growing climatic, market, and geopolitical uncertainty. However, limited evidence explains how digital rural construction strengthens resilience specifically at the grain-production stage. Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2023, this study constructs composite indices of digital rural construction and grain production resilience and applies a two-way fixed effects model, a mediation model, and a panel threshold model to examine its direct effect, transmission mechanism, and fiscal boundary condition. The results show that digital rural construction significantly improves grain production resilience, and this conclusion remains robust after sample adjustments, alternative variable measurement, and endogeneity tests. Heterogeneity analysis indicates stronger effects in western China, major grain-producing areas, and production-consumption balanced areas. Mechanism analysis shows that new quality agricultural productive forces partially mediate this relationship by upgrading agricultural labor, production tools, and factor allocation. The threshold results reveal two fiscal-support thresholds, 0.0699 and 0.1236: the effect of digital rural construction is strongest below the first threshold, weakens between the two thresholds, and becomes statistically insignificant above the second threshold. These findings provide policy evidence for strengthening food and nutrition security through digital rural development and more efficient fiscal support.

1 Introduction

Global food and nutrition security is increasingly exposed to multiple, overlapping sources of uncertainty. In recent years, climate change, extreme weather events, geopolitical conflicts, fluctuations in international grain prices, and disruptions to global supply chains have shifted the food security agenda from a narrow concern with aggregate output to a broader concern with stable access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food. The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2024 indicates that global progress toward ending hunger, food insecurity, and all forms of malnutrition remains insufficient and uneven, and that billions of people still lack reliable access to healthy diets (). For China, a developing country with a population of more than 1.4 billion, resilient grain production is closely related not only to domestic economic stability and basic livelihood protection but also to the affordability and availability of staple foods that underpin dietary energy supply and nutrition security. Unlike ordinary industrial goods, grain production is jointly shaped by natural conditions, resource endowments, factor inputs, technological capacity, and institutional arrangements. It is therefore cyclical, vulnerable, and partly public-good oriented.

Against this background, food security can no longer be understood solely as a static question of output sufficiency. It increasingly depends on whether the production system can maintain stable supply, recover rapidly from shocks, adapt continuously, and support long-term access to nutritionally essential foods. Recent evidence from China’s forest carbon sink research further shows that climate-response capacity is shaped not only by ecological endowments but also by research and development intensity, industrial structure upgrading, governance intervention, and regional spillover effects (). This reinforces the need to examine grain production resilience within a broader framework that links climate pressure, ecological governance, technological innovation, and food and nutrition security capacity.

At the same time, China has continued to promote the application of digital technologies in agricultural and rural modernization. The Action Plan for Digital Rural Development (2022–2025) emphasizes digital infrastructure upgrading, smart agriculture innovation, and digital governance capacity, with the aim of accelerating the digital transformation of agricultural production and management and achieving initial progress in smart agriculture by 2025 (). The 2024 Central No. 1 Document further calls for continued implementation of the digital rural development strategy, the development of smart agriculture, the narrowing of the urban–rural digital divide, the construction of regional big data platforms, and stronger coordination and sharing of agricultural information. The National Smart Agriculture Action Plan (2024–2028) also proposes that, by the end of 2028, information technology should play a visible role in reducing costs, increasing yields, and improving efficiency in grain, oil, and other important agricultural products (). These policy developments suggest that digital rural construction is becoming an important support for risk warning, resource allocation, and system recovery in grain production. The concept of resilience was first used to explain the capacity of ecological systems to maintain structural and functional stability under external disturbance (). It was later introduced into food systems and agricultural economics to analyze the ability of food systems to sustain supply, nutrition security, and social welfare under shocks and stresses (, ). From this perspective, grain production resilience is not a simple extension of output level. Rather, it captures the integrated capacity of a grain production system to ensure stable supply, respond to risks, stabilize food prices, and maintain the production-side foundation for adequate dietary intake in complex and uncertain environments.

Existing studies on grain production resilience have mainly addressed three issues: measurement, spatiotemporal evolution, and determinants. One strand of research focuses on evaluation systems and regional differences, arguing that grain production resilience in China displays clear spatial disparities and is influenced by agricultural resource endowments, technological conditions, stages of economic development, and infrastructure (). A second strand extends the object of analysis from production alone to the broader food system, emphasizing that food security depends not only on production capacity but also on circulation, consumption, governance, and risk regulation (). A third strand examines the formation of food resilience from the perspectives of digital inclusive finance, labor migration, and farmland operation, suggesting that financial access, factor mobility, and scale operation affect the stability of food systems and grain production by improving resource allocation (, ). These studies provide an important foundation for understanding grain production resilience. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how digital rural construction, as a comprehensive digital and institutional arrangement, may strengthen the production-side basis of food availability, price stability, and nutrition security.

Digital rural construction is a concrete extension of the Digital China strategy to agriculture and rural areas and an important pathway for agricultural and rural modernization. Unlike a narrow focus on information infrastructure, digital rural construction encompasses digital infrastructure, rural industrial digitalization, digital finance, rural e-commerce, digital governance, and the development of agricultural data resources. Its essence lies in embedding digital technologies, data elements, and platform-based organizations into the economic and social operation of rural areas (). The integration of the digital economy and agriculture can promote agricultural modernization by improving infrastructure, optimizing the behavior of agricultural operators, and reshaping industrial processes (). Related evidence from Chinese listed firms shows that digital transformation can reduce supply chain concentration by improving information transparency and information acquisition capability, thereby supporting supply-chain diversification and robustness (). Although this evidence is drawn from the corporate sector, it is consistent with the argument that digital technologies reshape inter-organizational relationships and resource coordination, which is relevant to the resilience of agricultural production and circulation systems. The rural digital economy can also increase agricultural total factor productivity through multiple pathways, including production upgrading, management transformation, and industrial improvement, thereby enhancing the quality of agricultural development (). International research similarly shows that smart farming and digital agriculture can improve agricultural efficiency and sustainability through precision management, resource conservation, risk identification, and knowledge sharing (, ). Taken together, these findings indicate that digital technology is moving from an external auxiliary tool to a key input in the agricultural production function, with deeper implications for production, management, governance, and food-system resilience.

From the perspective of grain production resilience, digital rural construction may operate through at least three channels that are relevant to nutrition-oriented food security. First, digital infrastructure improves rural information accessibility and alleviates information asymmetry in traditional grain production. This enables agricultural operators to obtain meteorological information, input prices, market demand, and policy support in a more timely manner, thereby improving risk anticipation and production decision-making. More stable grain production can reduce the likelihood of supply disruption and sharp price fluctuations in staple foods, which are important determinants of household food access. Second, industrial digitalization introduces intelligent agricultural machinery, remote sensing, the agricultural Internet of Things, agricultural big data, and digital extension services into grain production. These technologies improve precision in sowing, irrigation, plant protection, harvesting, and post-disaster recovery. Smart agriculture can strengthen the shock resistance and recovery capacity of grain production systems through intelligent forecasting, disaster identification, and factor allocation (). Third, digital finance, rural e-commerce, and digital governance tools can improve farmers’ financing capacity, market connectivity, and access to public services, thereby enhancing the adaptability of grain production systems under market fluctuations and disaster shocks. Previous research has shown that digital rural construction strengthens the resilience of China’s food system, with rural digital finance and digital service platforms playing relatively stable enabling roles (). Incorporating digital rural construction into the analytical framework of grain production resilience therefore helps explain how the upstream production capacity required for food and nutrition security is formed in the era of digital transformation.

It is also important to recognize that the effect of digital rural construction on grain production resilience may not be purely linear. On the one hand, the extent to which digital technologies empower agriculture depends on whether productive forces can be upgraded. As the concept of new quality productive forces is extended to agriculture, increasing emphasis has been placed on the coordinated advancement of scientific and technological innovation, data elements, intelligent equipment, and human capabilities. New quality agricultural productive forces are dynamic and regionally differentiated, and their formation is closely associated with agricultural technological progress, the upgrading of production tools, and the reorganization of production factors (). The digital economy can enhance grain production resilience through technological innovation capacity and agricultural product marketing capacity, while digital inclusive finance can strengthen grain production resilience through agricultural technological innovation (, ). This suggests that digital rural construction does not merely improve grain production conditions directly. It may also enhance the stable supply capacity and risk response capacity of grain production systems by upgrading agricultural labor, means of production, and objects of labor. At the same time, the role of digital rural construction is constrained by public resource allocation. Fiscal support for agriculture can provide public investment for agricultural infrastructure, extension services, and risk-prevention systems, all of which are closely related to the capacity of local food systems to maintain stable supply under shocks. Yet if fiscal resources are inefficiently allocated or poorly structured, the enabling effect of digitalization may weaken. Local fiscal expenditure on agriculture, forestry, and water affairs is therefore an important condition for digitalization to strengthen agricultural resilience, and the effect of agricultural informatization on agricultural total factor productivity may also exhibit threshold characteristics (, ).

Overall, the existing literature provides a useful foundation for studying digital rural construction and grain production resilience, but three gaps remain. First, studies of digital rural construction have largely focused on high-quality agricultural development, agricultural total factor productivity, farmers’ income, and rural governance, while systematic evidence on its impact on grain production resilience remains limited. Second, research on food resilience often adopts a food-system or supply-chain perspective, leaving the stability, adaptability, and transformative capacity of the production stage underexplored, even though production shocks are transmitted downstream to food availability, affordability, and diet quality. Third, the mechanisms and boundary conditions through which digital rural construction affects grain production resilience have not been sufficiently clarified, particularly the roles of agricultural productivity upgrading and fiscal support for agriculture.

To address these gaps, this study uses panel data from 30 Chinese provinces from 2012 to 2023 to examine how digital rural construction affects grain production resilience. After constructing composite indices of digital rural construction and grain production resilience, this study applies a two-way fixed effects model, a mediation model, and a panel threshold model to identify the direct effect, transmission mechanism, and fiscal boundary condition of digital rural construction. The study contributes to the literature in three respects. First, while existing research has mainly examined food-system resilience or the broader impact of the digital economy on agriculture, this study focuses specifically on the grain-production stage, thereby clarifying how digital rural construction contributes to the stability, recovery, and adaptive capacity of staple-food production. This provides production-side evidence for understanding nutrition security, especially the availability and affordability of staple foods in developing-country contexts. Second, beyond estimating the average effect of digital rural construction, this study introduces new quality agricultural productive forces as a mechanism variable, providing evidence that rural digital transformation enhances grain production resilience by upgrading agricultural laborers, production tools, and factor allocation. Third, by incorporating fiscal support for agriculture as a threshold variable, this study identifies the public-finance conditions under which digital rural construction is more or less effective, offering policy insights into how fiscal support can be better aligned with digital rural development to strengthen grain production resilience and, ultimately, the upstream foundation of food and nutrition security.

2 Theoretical analysis and research hypotheses

2.1 Direct effect of digital rural construction on grain production resilience

Grain production resilience refers to the comprehensive capacity of a grain production system to maintain stable supply, recover rapidly, and continue adapting and upgrading under multiple shocks, including natural disasters, market fluctuations, resource constraints, and changes in the institutional environment. Drawing on digital technologies, digital platforms, and data elements, digital rural construction systematically reshapes agricultural production, operation, service provision, and governance. It thus provides new technological and organizational foundations for improving grain production resilience. The key to digitally enabled high-quality agricultural development is to overcome the constraints of inadequate information, inefficient resource allocation, and weak risk response in traditional agriculture through information sharing, technology diffusion, and factor reconfiguration (, ).

First, digital rural construction can strengthen the risk-resistance capacity of grain production systems. Grain production is highly dependent on natural conditions and is characterized by strong seasonality. Weather changes, the spread of pests and diseases, fluctuations in input prices, and shifts in market demand can all affect production stability. Traditional agricultural operators often rely on experience-based judgment and have limited access to information, making it difficult to identify external shocks in a timely manner. By expanding rural broadband networks, mobile communication, agricultural information platforms, digital financial services, and digital extension services, digital rural construction improves agricultural operators’ access to meteorological, market, input, policy, and technical information. More efficient information transmission enables grain producers to adjust planting schedules, input use, and risk-prevention strategies more quickly, thereby enhancing system stability under external disturbance.

Second, digital rural construction can improve the recovery and adjustment capacity of grain production systems. Resilience is reflected not only in pre-shock protection but also in post-shock recovery. The introduction of remote sensing, the agricultural Internet of Things, intelligent machinery, drone-based field inspection, and digital extension services can improve the speed of disaster identification, machinery dispatch, input delivery, and technical support. The development of digital finance, rural e-commerce, and agricultural socialized service platforms can also ease the financial, market, and service constraints faced by agricultural operators during post-disaster recovery. Digital technology-driven high-quality agricultural and rural development is not simply the replacement of one technology by another; rather, it involves the overall upgrading of production organization, public services, and governance capacity (). In this sense, digital rural construction can shorten the time required for a grain production system to move from a shocked state back to a stable state.

Third, digital rural construction can promote structural optimization in grain production systems. A higher level of resilience does not simply mean returning to the original state after a shock; it also implies upgrading production modes under pressure. By incorporating data elements into agricultural production, digital rural construction shifts grain production from experience-based judgment to data-driven decision-making, from extensive input use to precision management, and from single-link optimization to coordinated optimization across production, circulation, finance, and governance. Digital technologies empower agricultural development not only by improving production efficiency but also by strengthening agricultural value-chain coordination and reorganizing business models (). In the grain se