Does Rural Digital Infrastructure Strengthen Agricultural Industry-Chain Resilience? ——Evidence from the “Broadband Village” and Universal Telecommunications Service Pilot Programs

Enhancing the resilience of agricultural industry chains is essential for safeguarding food security and advancing agricultural modernization. Using panel data for 280 Chinese prefecture-level and above cities from 2011 to 2023, this study treats the staggered rollout of the “Broadband Village” Pilot Program and the Universal Telecommunications Service Pilot Program as quasi-natural experiments in rural digital infrastructure and estimates their effects with a staggered difference-in-differences design. The results show that rural digital infrastructure significantly strengthens agricultural industry-chain resilience. This finding is robust to parallel-trends tests, placebo tests, winsorization, alternative sample periods, and estimators that are robust to heterogeneous treatment effects. Dynamic estimates indicate that the effect is delayed and cumulative rather than immediate. Mechanism tests show that the policy significantly promotes agricultural agglomeration and has a weakly significant positive effect on industrial structure upgrading, providing supportive evidence for the agglomeration and structural-upgrading channels. Subsample estimates suggest that the effects are concentrated in eastern China, major grain-producing regions, and major grain-consuming regions. Overall, the resilience gains from digital infrastructure depend on the joint presence of an adequate industrial base, digital adoption capacity, and efficient circulation and logistics systems.