Digital–Agricultural Integration as a Driver of New Quality Agricultural Productivity

Promoting digital–agricultural integration is pivotal to cultivating new quality agricultural productivity, spearheading the next wave of agri-technological revolution, and accelerating agricultural modernization. Leveraging provincial panel data from China covering 2014 to 2023 and using a tailored evaluation framework, this study employs two-way fixed effects and threshold regression models to systematically examine the driving effect of digital–agricultural integration and its underlying mechanisms. Empirical results reveal the following: (1) Benchmark regressions confirm that digital–agricultural integration significantly drives the overall development of new quality agricultural productivity: each one-unit increase in the level of integration raises the level of new quality agricultural productivity by 0.155 units, and this driving effect is heterogeneous across productivity dimensions. (2) Regions with deeper integration exhibit a stronger driving effect, as revealed by the heterogeneity analysis; at the level of integration modes, digital innovation and digital application integration play significant roles, whereas digital infrastructure and digital industry integration show positive but statistically insignificant effects; and across agricultural functional zones, the driving effect exhibits a gradient of major grain-producing areas (0.239) > production-marketing balanced areas (0.122) > major grain-consuming areas (0.049). (3) Mechanism tests identify agricultural technology innovation and labor transfer as key transmission channels. (4) Further threshold analysis shows that once the level of integration crosses the thresholds of 0.337 and 0.673, the driving effect rises from 0.079 to 0.137 and then to 0.185, following a pattern of progressive strengthening from a weak base. These findings offer actionable insights for advancing sustainable agricultural development through targeted digital–agricultural integration policies.