Digital inclusive finance, digital literacy, and agricultural industrial structure upgrading in China

Using panel data for 31 Chinese provinces over 2011–2023, this study employs a two-way fixed-effects model to examine the effect of digital inclusive finance on agricultural industrial structure upgrading and to analyze its channels of influence. A particular focus is placed on the moderating role of rural residents’ digital literacy in the relationship between digital inclusive finance and agricultural industrial structure upgrading. The results show that digital inclusive finance significantly promotes agricultural industrial structure upgrading. This finding is consistent across agricultural functional zones and across provinces with differing levels of digital economy development, and remains robust to instrumental-variable estimation and a range of additional checks, including the treatment of extreme values, the exclusion of centrally administered municipalities, controls for the COVID-19 shock, and tests for lagged effects. Channel analysis shows that digital inclusive finance significantly improves access to credit, promotes agricultural value chain integration, and enhances the capacity to market agricultural products through digital channels, providing channel-level empirical evidence for understanding how digital inclusive finance affects agricultural industrial structure upgrading. Moreover, rural residents’ digital literacy significantly strengthens the positive effect of digital inclusive finance on agricultural industrial structure upgrading, with the effect becoming more pronounced at higher levels of digital literacy. These findings suggest that, in developing countries, digital inclusive finance does not automatically translate into agricultural industrial structure upgrading. Its effectiveness also depends on improvements in rural residents’ digital literacy and complementary advances in credit support, agricultural value chain integration, and digital sales conditions.