A Win–Win Scenario for Agricultural Green Development and Farmers’ Agricultural Income: An Empirical Analysis Based on the EKC Hypothesis

Due to severe resource and environmental constraints, agricultural green development is a vital step for the low-carbon development of China. How to achieve the goal of a win–win scenario that simultaneously improves agricultural green total factor productivity (GTFP) and farmers’ agricultural income was the main focus of this study. Based on the panel dataset for 31 provinces in China from 2000 to 2018, this study calculated the agricultural GTFP using the global Malmquist–Luenberger (GML) index to measure the green development of agriculture. Furthermore, this study investigated the relationship between the agricultural GTFP and agricultural income in an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework, together with the key factors affecting agricultural GTFP. The main results show that, first, driven by technical progress, the agricultural GTFP gradually increased across the country, while there existed a certain degree of heterogeneity in the growth of different regions. Second, the relationships between the agricultural GTFP and agricultural income exhibited a significant U-shape for the whole country and the four regions, indicating that a win–win scenario can be achieved between green development and income level. Third, industrialization and urbanization negatively affected agricultural GTFP, capital deepening played a positive role, and due to the mediated effect of capital deepening, the outflow of the agricultural labor force did not cause substantial harm to agricultural GTFP. The findings of our study provide useful policy implications for the promotion and development of agriculture in China.