Impact of digital economy on grain eco-efficiency: Empirical test based on panel data of 13 major grain-producing areas

Effectively alleviating the threat of resource and environment constraints on grain production and improving the level of grain eco-efficiency is the inevitable choice to continuously build the “fortress” of China’s grain security under the new situation. As a new economic form accompanying the change of information technology, digital economy can promote the high-quality development of grain industry through direct and indirect ways. Based on the panel data of 13 major grain-producing areas from 2013 to 2021, this study constructed digital economy indicators from two dimensions of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization, and measured the development level of digital economy and the level of grain eco-efficiency by using entropy weight method . The impact mechanism of digital economy on grain eco-efficiency was analyzed in multiple dimensions by using baseline regression, intermediary effect and threshold effect models, which was of great significance for clarifying the correlation between them. The results showed that the overall grain eco-efficiency of the 13 major grain producing areas showed an increasing trend from 2013 to 2021, which could be divided into three stages: rapid decline period, rapid increase period and slow increase period. Moreover, there were obvious spatial differences in grain eco-efficiency, which showed that the growth rate of grain eco-efficiency in the northern region was faster than that in the southern region. Digital economy had a significant positive impact on grain eco-efficiency, and the conclusion was still valid after a series of robustness tests, such as adjusting sample interval, eliminating outlier estimates and lagging explanatory variables. Heterogeneity analysis showed that digital industrialization had a more significant promoting effect on grain eco-efficiency than industrial digitalization, and the digital economy had a more significant promoting effect on grain eco-efficiency in northern regions and regions with low grain eco-efficiency. The intermediary effect showed that the scale of agricultural land management and agricultural social services had a significant promoting effect on improving grain eco-efficiency indicating that the digital economy could indirectly achieve the purpose of improving grain eco-efficiency by expanding the scale of agricultural land management and improving agricultural social services. The threshold test results showed that the digital economy had a double threshold of influence on grain eco-efficiency based on the fiscal support for agriculture, and presented a non-linear feature of increasing marginal effect, that was, the higher the fiscal support for agriculture, the more conducive the digital economy to improve grain eco-efficiency. In order to continuously improve the grain eco-efficiency, it is necessary to improve the construction of new rural digital infrastructure, increase the scale of agricultural production and the level of socialized services, optimize the structure of fiscal support for agriculture, highlight the development orientation of green policies, and adopt a differentiated collaborative promotion strategy of digital economy and grain eco-efficiency.