Abstract:
Deeply anchoring the strategic goals of the “dual carbon” initiative and promoting the green and high-quality development of agriculture have become an inevitable choice for China’s agricultural transformation. Farmers’ adoption behavior of green technologies is key to alleviating rigid constraints of resources and the environmental and enabling sustainable agricultural evolution. Based on three-wave micro-level unbalanced panel data from the China Land Economic Survey spanning 2020–2022, this paper constructed a panel random-effects ordered Probit model to empirically examine the impact of agricultural subsidies on farmers’ adoption of green production technologies and its underlying mechanisms. The findings revealed that agricultural subsidies significantly promoted farmers’ adoption of green production technologies, and this result remained robust across a series of robustness checks. Agricultural subsidies facilitate green technology adoption by increasing farmers’ agricultural insurance expenditures. Heterogeneity analysis indicated that the subsidy effect on green technology adoption varied significantly with respect to preferences and resource endowments: the promoting effect was more pronounced among groups with lower time preferences, small-scale farmers, and both pure agricultural households and non-agricultural households. Therefore, policy efforts should pivot toward linking subsidies with green performance, strengthen the “fiscal subsidy and insurance” policy synergy, and implement differentiated support strategies to improve the categorical allocation of socialized services.