Evaluation of Digital Empowerment in the Agricultural Industry for High-quality Development and Analysis of Obstacles

Based on panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2015 to 2021, this paper built an evaluation index system for the high-quality development of digitally empowered agricultural industry from agricultural digital input and agricultural digital output, evaluated and analyzed it using entropy method, and conducted spatial autocorrelation test. On this basis, an obstacle degree model was used to analyze the main obstacles to the high-quality development level of the digital empowerment agricultural industry. The results showed that, (1) From the perspective of development level, the overall trend of the high-quality development level of digitally empowered agricultural industry in China from 2015 to 2021 showed stable growth, with the east leading and the northeast and west relatively lagging behind. (2) From the perspective of spatial analysis, the spatial distribution of the high-quality development level of China’ s digitally empowered agricultural industry showed obvious positive correlation, and the overall Moran’ s I showed a fluctuating trend of decreasing first and then increasing, with significant spatial differences. Spatial agglomeration mainly expressed the spatial correlation state of H-H agglomeration, L-H agglomeration and L-L agglomeration. (3) From the perspective of obstacle factors, the main obstacles that restrict the high-quality development of China’ s digitally enabled agricultural industry included the application intensity of agricultural pesticides, the transformation of technological achievements, e-commerce procurement and communication infrastructure coverage.