Agricultural New Quality Productive Forces and Comprehensive Rural Revitalization in China: Evidence on Human Capital, Industrial Upgrading, and Technological Innovation

This study uses balanced panel data for 30 provincial-level regions in China from 2012 to 2022 to examine the relationship between agricultural new quality productive forces (ANQPF) and comprehensive rural revitalization (CRR). ANQPF is measured using a multidimensional framework that captures changes in agricultural workers, means of production, and objects of production, while CRR is constructed from 18 indicators after directly overlapping indicators are removed. A supplementary ANQPF index excluding rural disposable income is also used as a sensitivity check. The baseline two-way fixed-effects results show a positive association between ANQPF and CRR (β = 0.2769, SE = 0.0484, p < 0.001), and the positive relationship is preserved across several alternative measurement and sample-processing checks. Bootstrap channel analyses suggest that rural human capital and industrial structure upgrading are plausible pathways linking ANQPF with CRR, while the evidence for agricultural technological innovation is comparatively weaker and specification-sensitive. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the positive association is stronger in provinces with more developed agricultural organizational conditions, whereas differences related to cultivated-land resource endowment are less consistent. The threshold analysis further identifies a sample-specific nonlinear pattern, which is treated as exploratory. Overall, the findings indicate that agricultural productive-system transformation is positively associated with broader rural revitalization.