Does ecological sustainability policy promote rural income? Evidence from China’s key ecological function areas

The ecological abundance area is faced with the trade-off between the protection of ecological resources and the improvement of residents’ income, and the pursuit of achieving the two goals has also given birth to the development of ecological economy. Using panel data from 1893 counties in China’s national key ecological functional zones from 2007–2022, this study empirically explored the impact of national key ecological functional zones on rural residents’ income. The results revealed that the key national ecological function zones significantly promoted the income of rural residents. In addition, this study adopts propensity score matching and entropy balance matching to overcome the differences between groups caused by covariate characteristics and excludes a series of policy influences, and the estimation results are still robust. The mechanism test revealed that national key ecological functional zones improve the income of rural residents in three ways: promoting agricultural revitalization, industrial support and transforming the ecological value. The findings provide a new reference for the policy practice of the sustainable development of residents in underdeveloped areas.