Where Does Resilience Come from? Assessing the Impact of High-Standard Farmland Construction on Agricultural Economic Resilience

Enhancing agricultural economic resilience is a key strategy for coping with external shocks, ensuring national food security, and advancing agricultural modernization. Using panel data from 30 Chinese provinces covering the period 2005–2022, this study constructs an evaluation framework for agricultural economic resilience from three dimensions—resistance, recovery, and renewal. A continuous difference-in-differences (DID) model is employed to examine the effects and underlying mechanisms of the high-standard farmland construction (HSFC) policy on agricultural economic resilience. The results show that: (1) HSFC significantly improves agricultural economic resilience, and this finding remains robust after a series of robustness checks, including parallel trend tests and the instrumental variables approach. (2) Mechanism analysis reveals that HSFC enhances agricultural economic resilience primarily through four channels: improving infrastructure, promoting mechanization, facilitating scale management, and enhancing the agro-ecological environment. (3) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the policy effects are more pronounced in agriculture-dominated provinces, paddy-dominated regions, and areas with high exposure to natural risks. These findings provide empirical evidence supporting the further advancement of HSFC in China and offer a “Chinese solution” for building resilient agricultural systems through land-use policies in the context of an increasingly complex global environment.