Can Digital Inclusive Finance Reduce Agricultural Pollution Emission Intensity?

As an important component of rural revitalization and the green transformation of agriculture, the effectiveness of agricultural pollution control depends on the efficient mobilization and use of rural financial resources. Using a balanced panel of 31 Chinese provinces over 2011–2024, this study employs a two-way fixed effects model, a shift-share instrumental variable strategy, a mediation analysis and a panel threshold model to examine how digital inclusive finance affects agricultural pollution emission intensity. Three findings stand out. First, digital inclusive finance significantly reduces pollution emission intensity, with a 1% increase in the digital inclusive finance index lowering emission intensity by about 0.286%. Second, the effect operates partly through an indirect channel: digital inclusive finance fosters new quality agricultural productive forces, which in turn curb pollution, and the indirect effect is estimated with bias-corrected bootstrap confidence intervals. Third, the relationship is non-linear and follows a double-threshold pattern of increasing marginal returns. Agricultural economic scale, cropping structure and livestock structure are positively associated with pollution, as are environmental regulation and production conditions, whereas a more capable agricultural workforce and a larger stock of agricultural business entities reduce pollution. The study’s novelty lies in formally introducing agricultural new quality productive forces as a mediating mechanism linking digital inclusive finance to agricultural pollution control and in documenting its threshold-shaped, increasingly pronounced effect.