Green Box Rules and Credit Accessibility: Empirical Evidence from New Agricultural Business Entities in Shandong Province, China

Under the framework of the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, China’s agricultural support policies have gradually shifted from price-based interventions toward inclusive financial support and general government services. This study investigates the determinants of credit accessibility among new agricultural business entities and discusses the policy implications of the findings within the WTO Green Box framework. Using micro-level survey data collected from 14 prefecture-level cities in Shandong Province, China, this study develops a binary logistic regression model to identify the factors influencing credit accessibility among agricultural operators. The results show that decision-makers’ income, production scale, and awareness of the expanded scope of acceptable collateral significantly increase the probability of obtaining credit, whereas general understanding of credit terms is not statistically significant. In contrast, the effects of decision-makers’ age and village cadre status are statistically insignificant. Based on these findings, this study proposes legal and policy recommendations from three perspectives: improving the agricultural support framework, enhancing the operational capacity of agricultural entities, and encouraging financial institutions to innovate credit products. The findings offer insights into alleviating financing constraints among new agricultural business entities and provide an empirical basis for designing public support measures that may be broadly consistent with the WTO Green Box framework for sustainable agricultural development.