Abstract
The sustainable development of agriculture is significant in protecting natural resources, protecting the ecological environment, ensuring food security, and eliminating poverty. Rural road construction promotes the flow of labor and capital between urban and rural areas, and plays a vital role in agricultural production and rural revitalization. This study aims to analyze the effect of rural road construction on the sustainable development of regional agriculture in China. We select five-dimensional indexes of population, society, economy, resources, and environment and use the entropy method to calculate the agricultural sustainable development index of each province in China. Then, we construct the spatial econometric model to explore the influence based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2002 to 2018. The benchmark results show that rural road construction significantly promotes the sustainable development of agriculture; however, it has a negative impact on environmental sustainability, and the influence is lagging. The results are also heterogeneous among regions. Rural road construction has significantly promoted the sustainable development of agriculture in eastern and central areas, but has no significant impact on western regions. The reason is that the siphoning effect caused by the construction of rural roads has led to a loss of talents and capital in the western region, which harms the sustainable development of the population and resource system. This effect offsets the positive effect of the other three systems. This research has substantial policy implications for promoting rural revitalization and agricultural development.
Highlights
Accepted: 27 September 2021Agriculture is the foundation of national economic development and occupies an important position in social development
To know whether there are differences in sustainable agricultural development in different regions, this paper calculates the coefficient of variation to explore the balance of regional agricultural sustainable development in China
The coefficient of variation is a commonly used index to measure the relative difference of an attribute in the whole study area between years
Summary
Accepted: 27 September 2021Agriculture is the foundation of national economic development and occupies an important position in social development. The agricultural economy has developed rapidly because of science and technology and the accelerated process of agricultural modernization It has brought about many problems, such as the over-exploitation of farming resources, the excessive use of agricultural inputs, the over-extraction of groundwater, a large degree of social resource consumption, environmental pollution, and other issues [6]. China’s rural roads have developed rapidly in recent years As it is shown, from 2015 to 2019, the overall mileage of rural road construction in China has shown a general growth trend. At At present, road construction hashas achieved excellent results under thethe promotion of national policies. According to China’s “Highway Engineering Technical Standards” (JTG B01-2014) on the classification standards of graded roads, the roads are divided into highways, first-class roads, second-class roads, third-class roads, and fourth-class roads to their tasks, functions, and flows. Arterial roads connecting political and economic centers, large industrial and mining areas, or suburban roads with heavy traffic Third-class
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