What can green finance do for high-quality agricultural development? Fresh insights from China

Achieving high-quality agricultural development is a fundamental requirement for addressing agricultural bottlenecks and significant social contradictions. Green finance provides reliable financial support and ecological guarantees for realizing high-quality agricultural development. This study utilizes Chinese panel data from 2007 to 2021, incorporating a two-way fixed effects model, a mediating effects model, and a threshold effects model to explore the impact and mechanism of green finance on the high-quality development of agriculture. Furthermore, it constructs a spatial Durbin model to expand the analysis of its impact from the perspective of the spatial spillover effect. The results reveal that green finance significantly contributes to high-quality agricultural development with a greater impact on the eastern regions and high-level agricultural regions of China. Science and technology innovation has bridged the green finance system and pushed high-quality agricultural development, with a contribution rate of 25.71%. A single threshold for economic development and technological innovation in green finance for high-quality agricultural development exhibit distinctly non-linear characteristics. In addition, expansive analysis shows that green finance can not only facilitate the high-quality development of local agriculture but also drive the high-level development of agriculture in neighboring regions through spatial spillover effects. To achieve this goal, the proposed countermeasures aim to enhance the service system of green financial support for agriculture, promote scientific and technological innovation, improve factor allocation efficiency, and tailor green financial support for critical agricultural areas based on local conditions.