Mechanism and Empirical Analysis of the Impact of Industrial Agglomeration on the Green Development of the Dairy Industry

The dairy industry, with the longest supply chain in the food sector, plays a crucial role in national welfare and people’s livelihood and has significant responsibilities for green, low-carbon and sustainable development. Based on panel data from 28 Chinese provinces between the years 2008 and 2021, this paper assessed the green development of the dairy industry using the super-efficiency epsilon-based measure (EBM) model and the global Malmquist-Luenberger (GML) index. On the basis of clarifying the formation mechanism of the environmental effect of dairy industrial agglomeration, this paper established benchmark regression models and intermediary effect models to examine the impact and mechanism of industrial agglomeration in the dairy industry on its green development. It was found that (1) industrial agglomeration significantly promoted the green development of the dairy industry, and this finding still holds after robustness and endogeneity tests, such as replacing the green development metrics, changing the clustering level, performing instrumental variable estimation and using heteroscedasticity-based instrumental variable methods; (2) the mechanism test showed that industrial agglomeration played a positive role in the green development of the dairy industry by improving the level of technological innovation and informatization; (3) group-wise regression results showed that for provinces that had not implemented the “ten-million-ton project” with low levels of good manufacturing practices, industrial agglomeration exerted a more positive effect on the green development of the dairy industry. Drawing on these findings, the study offers policy recommendations to advance the integration of industrial clusters and the green development of the dairy industry chain.