The effect of green finance policy on agricultural new quality productive forces: evidence from China’s green finance reform and innovation pilot zones

Developing agricultural new quality productive forces is a key driver for advancing high-quality agriculture and accelerating the construction of a national agricultural powerhouse. Green finance, as a critical policy instrument for promoting green transition, plays a vital role in enabling agricultural new quality productive forces. Yet, whether green finance effectively fosters agricultural new quality productive forces and through which mechanisms remain open questions. Using panel data from 294 Chinese prefecture-level cities between 2010 and 2023, this study leverages the Green Finance Reform and Innovation Pilot Zones (GFRIPZ) policy as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) approach to assess its impact on agricultural new quality productive forces. Our results show that green finance significantly enhances agricultural new quality productive forces. Mechanism analysis reveals that this effect operates primarily through the promotion of green technological innovation and the improvement of credit access. Heterogeneity analysis further indicates that the policy effect is more pronounced in lower-tier, smaller cities, suggesting that green finance policies generate greater marginal benefits in relatively less-developed regions.