Rural industrial integration and green production scale of leading agricultural enterprises: evidence from Jiangxi Province, China

Promoting rural industrial integration with leading agricultural enterprises as the primary driver is one of the key pathways for advancing agricultural green transformation, and the green production scale of leading agricultural enterprises serves as an important indicator for evaluating the role and effectiveness of this pathway. However, research examining the association between rural industrial integration and green production among leading agricultural enterprises remains limited. Using panel data from 711 leading agricultural enterprises in Jiangxi Province from 2021 to 2023, this study empirically examines the association between rural industrial integration and the green production scale of leading agricultural enterprises. To address potential endogeneity and model specification concerns, a Mundlak/CRE model is employed, which decomposes the association into within-firm and between-firm effects. The findings reveal that the between-firm effect of rural industrial integration is significantly positive, while the within-firm effect is not statistically significant, indicating that firms with higher levels of industrial integration tend to have larger green production scale, whereas within the same firm, changes in industrial integration are not significantly associated with changes in green production scale. This conclusion remains robust after a series of checks, including sample transformation, winsorization, and lagged one-period regression. Boundary condition analysis indicates that firm profitability and debt level do not constitute significant boundary conditions, whereas provincial capital status appears to moderate the between-firm association, suggesting that the between-firm positive association may be stronger among firms in provincial capital cities. Accordingly, three policy recommendations are proposed: actively promoting rural industrial integration; guiding leading agricultural enterprises to expand green production scale alongside integration; and considering regional institutional differences when designing industrial integration policies.