Does Environmental Enforcement Promote Agricultural Green Productivity? The Moderating Roles of Land Transfer and Insurance

The green transition in agriculture is a key issue for achieving sustainable development. Based on panel data from 30 Chinese provinces covering the period from 2011 to 2022, this paper examines the relationship between environmental enforcement and agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP), with a focus on analyzing the moderating effects of land transfer and agricultural insurance, as well as their synergistic threshold characteristics. The study employs two-way fixed-effects models, moderating effect models, and Hansen threshold regression methods for empirical analysis. The baseline regression results show a significant positive association between environmental enforcement and AGTFP. This conclusion remains robust after various tests, including truncation, replacement of core explanatory variables, difference GMM, and instrumental variables. The decomposition test shows that this positive correlation is mainly reflected through the channel of technological progress, rather than the improvement in technical efficiency. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive association is more pronounced in regions with high GDP, strong law enforcement capacity, and in northern regions. Moderation analysis reveals that both the land transfer rate and insurance depth positively moderate the relationship between environmental enforcement and AGTFP, and the two exhibit a synergistic effect. However, this synergistic effect exhibits nonlinear characteristics and may weaken or even reverse at extreme value intervals. A threshold model further reveals an asymmetric complementary relationship between the two institutional conditions. The moderating effect of land transfer is activated only after insurance depth crosses a threshold value, while the moderating effect of insurance depth is most effective during the small-scale farming stage. These findings suggest that environmental regulation policies should be advanced in coordination with land transfer and agricultural insurance systems, with a focus on institutional alignment and coordination.