Research on the Impact and Spillover Effect of Green Agricultural Reform Policy Pilot on Governmental Environmental Protection Behaviors Based on Quasi-Natural Experiments of China’s Two Provinces from 2012 to 2020

The green agricultural reform policy pilot embraces the development trend of the times. The green agricultural policy pilot implemented in China’s Zhejiang Province is an attempt to find a balance between environmental protection and economic development in order to achieve the national “dual carbon” goals. Have the goals been achieved? Zhejiang Province is the national pilot zone of green agricultural development. Jiangsu Province is notably homogeneous with Zhejiang Province but has not been included in the pilot policy. Based on the comparative studies of the two provinces with quasi-natural experiment logic, this paper analyzes the mechanism of the national green agricultural pilot zone policy acting on the environmental protection behavior of local governments and the actual effect of such policy using the data of 22 cities in both provinces from 2012 and 2020 as the panel data and relying on the DID model. According to the research findings, the national green agricultural development pilot zone policy has significantly increased the investment of local governments in environmental protection in Zhejiang Province where the policy has been fully implemented, and the negative spillover effect has reduced the economic governance efficiency of local governments in the short term. However, the investment of local governments in Jiangsu Province where the policy has not been fully implemented has not increased significantly and the economic governance efficiency has not reduced significantly. Double robustness tests based on the parallel trend test and DID-PSM (Differences-In-Differences and Propensity Score Matching) have verified the reliability of the research findings. Both Zhejiang and Jiangsu are provinces with developed industrial economies. Agriculture only accounts for a small proportion of their GDP. In addition, there is a natural conflict between green agriculture and industrial manufacturing in these two provinces. However, for those provinces dominated by agriculture or tourism, the effect of such green agricultural development policy may be different, which requires follow-up deeper research in an effort to thoroughly learn about the impact of agricultural policy pilot on local environmental protection behaviors, especially economic performance.