Mechanisms and effects of the digital economy on agricultural modernization: A sustainable development perspective

Agricultural modernization (AM) is a core element of green development and a key pillar for modern industrial upgrading. It plays an essential role in boosting productivity, sustaining ecology, and enhancing system resilience. With the rapid growth of the digital economy (DE), digital technologies have increasingly penetrated agriculture, making digital transformation a vital means to advance AM. This process optimizes production and resource use, improves rural conditions, and drives agriculture toward modernization and high-quality green growth. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates how the DE drives AM. Based on panel data from 30 Chinese provinces and municipalities for 2012-2022, fixed-effects, mediation, and threshold models are applied to test the DE's direct, indirect, and nonlinear impacts on AM. The findings indicate that the DE significantly improves AM at the 1 % level, primarily by upgrading the agricultural industrial structure and enhancing rural entrepreneurial capacity. Further threshold effect analysis demonstrates that the positive influence of the DE on AM exhibits clear stage-dependent characteristics, intensifying as the level of AM and the degree of integration between agriculture and the service sector increase. This effect becomes especially significant when AM attains a medium-to-high level and when the agricultural and service sector integration index exceeds 0.426. However, when the proportion of labor return exceeds 0.072, excessive return migration may distort factor allocation and weaken the positive impact of the DE on AM. Accordingly, it is recommended that regions tailor their strategies to local development stages and resource endowments, improve rural digital infrastructure, deepen the integration of modern services with agriculture, foster diversified smart agriculture and entrepreneurship support systems, and effectively mitigate resource misallocation risks caused by irrational labor return, thereby enhancing the synergistic effect of the DE and AM.