The Impact of Industrial Structure Policies on Land Use Performance in Specialty Agriculture: Evidence from China’s Agricultural Supply-Side Structural Reform

Industrial structure policies for specialty agriculture aim to optimize production, product, and industrial structures in China, yet their effect on land use performance through local government competitive actions remains underexplored. Using a balanced panel dataset covering 292 prefecture-level and above cities in China from 2010 to 2023, this study treats China’s Agricultural Supply-Side Structural Reform (ASSR) as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a generalized difference-in-differences model to examine the effects and mechanisms of industrial structure policies on land use performance in specialty agriculture. The results indicate that industrial structure policies significantly improve land use performance in specialty agriculture, with local government competitive actions in product quality improvement, market channel development, and industrial integration serving as three important transmission mechanisms. In addition, the policy effect is particularly pronounced in non-provincial capital cities, non-major grain-producing areas, and regions southeast of China’s Hu Line, and stronger market integration further amplifies this effect. The study contributes a multidimensional land use performance framework and a local government competition channel for understanding how macro-level industrial policies translate into land use performance, with implications for differentiated land governance in developing economies.