Enhancing Sustainable Agriculture: The Role of Digital Inclusive Finance in Promoting Cultivated Land Use Efficiency in the Yangtze River Delta

Improving cultivated land use efficiency (CLUE) is a crucial pathway to solve China’s food security challenges. In recent years, the development of digital inclusive finance (DIF) has transformed the economic effects of input and output in the cultivated land utilization process. Employing Yangtze River Delta as the experimental area, which represents one of China’s most densely populated regions with the most acute arable land scarcity per capita, this study utilized a super-efficiency slacks-based measure (SBM) model that incorporated undesirable outputs to measure CLUE using a balanced panel data of 25 prefecture-level cities in the Yangtze River Delta from 2011 to 2023. Additionally, this study employed panel regression analysis combined with a mediation effect model to examine the impact of DIF on CLUE. The findings are as follows. (1) CLUE exhibits an upward trend throughout the study period, with significant improvements noted in the northwest regions, and evolves into a spatial distribution of “high in the northwest and low in the south.” (2) DIF effectively enhances CLUE, supported by extensive robustness tests. (3) Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the effect of DIF on CLUE varies systematically across contexts: it peaks in regions undergoing medium-level urbanization, remains most potent under extremely low credit availability, and is optimized by moderate bank outlet coverage. (4) Mechanism analysis demonstrates that the DIF positively influences CLUE by increasing fixed-asset investment in the primary industry. Based on these results, this study provides targeted policy recommendations for digital inclusive finance to serve the high-quality development of cultivated land utilization.