Coupling coordination of urban–rural integration and county prosperity industries: identifying obstacle factors using empirical data from 135 counties in Hebei Province, China

Background County prosperity industries and urban–rural integration are two coupled systems that jointly shape high-quality rural development. This paper examines how well these two systems coordinate across Hebei’s 135 counties (cities and districts) from 2014 to 2024. Methods We pair the coupling coordination degree model with Dagum Gini decomposition, obstacle degree diagnosis, and a two-way fixed-effects panel regression with city-level clustered standard errors. Results The coupling coordination degree rose from 0.439 in 2014 to 0.510 in 2024, shifting from the verge of imbalance to barely coordinated, with a clear upward break in 2020. Regional gaps narrowed through latecomer catch-up rather than a slowdown in leading zones. The overall Gini coefficient fell from 0.074 to 0.049, with between-group differences as the main source. The obstacle structure barely changed: vegetable output, agricultural chain extension, fiscal revenue, and road density led the ranking throughout. In the panel regression, all four were positively associated with the coupling coordination degree, vegetable output most strongly, while general public budget revenue had no independent effect once county and year fixed effects were absorbed. Discussion The findings call for zone-specific policies rather than uniform transfers: the coastal zone should deepen processing and cold-chain logistics, the core zone should tighten Beijing–Tianjin supply-chain links, the central-southern zone should build vegetable processing clusters, and the NW ecological zone should expand ecological compensation and ecotourism. More broadly, in a large agricultural province, the persistent obstacle is not output scale but chain depth and factor connectivity.