Ecosystem Product Value Realization Policy and Rural Economic Resilience: Quasi-Natural Experimental Evidence from China’s Pilot Program

The institutional exploration of China’s ecological product value realization mechanism provides a unique context for studying the relationship between ecological capitalization and rural development. This paper uses national county-level panel data from 2016 to 2023, taking the GEP (Gross Ecosystem Product) assessment pilot policy as a quasi-natural experiment, and employs a staggered difference-in-differences model to evaluate its causal effect on rural economic resilience. The study finds that the pilot policy increased the economic resilience index of the treatment group by an average of approximately 1.5 percentage points, a conclusion that remains robust under multiple robustness tests. The reduced-form patterns are consistent with three plausible channels, namely income-structure adjustment, ecological-asset financialization, and income-risk smoothing. Heterogeneity analysis reveals that the policy effect is more significant in areas with high forest cover and in western regions.