特色农业产业集群建设与县域经济发展差距OACHSSCD

Counties serve as key nodes linking urban civilization and agrarian society and play an important role in economic development,livelihood protection,and long-term social stability.Although county-level economic disparities in China have generally narrowed in recent years,regional divergence still exists.Thus,addressing the imbalance in county-level economic development and promoting coordinated regional growth pose both theoretical and practical challenges to advancing Chinese modernization.Theoretically,characteristic agricultural industrial clusters built on local resource endowments and comparative advantages offer an important path to strengthening growth momentum in less-developed counties and fostering coordinated regional development.However,existing studies have not fully examined the effects of such cluster development on county-level economic disparities and its mechanisms.A closer examination of this issue can enrich the relevant literature and provide policy support for narrowing county-level development gaps through cluster development. This paper uses the policy of establishing advantageous characteristic industrial clusters as a quasi-natural experiment,analyzes panel data from 1,522 counties in China from 2014 to 2023 with a multi-period difference-in-differences model,and assesses the impact of characteristic agricultural industrial cluster development on county-level economic disparities.The construction of distinctive agricultural industrial clusters has a long-term narrowing effect on county-level economic development gaps,and this conclusion remains valid after addressing endogeneity and conducting robustness tests.Mechanism analysis reveals that the effect operates through improving the distribution of agriculture-related enterprises,fostering mutually beneficial relationships among industry participants,and addressing imbalances in public fiscal resources.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect is more pronounced in regions with higher marketization,stronger collectivist cultural traits,and lower fiscal pressure.Therefore,efforts should be made to promote coordinated cluster development,activate mechanisms to reduce economic gaps,and account for regional differences. The paper makes the following marginal contributions.First,it integrates characteristic agricultural industrial clusters with county-level economic disparities within a regional development framework,enriching research on both cluster externalities and regional coordination.Second,using symbiosis theory,it analyzes mechanisms of reducing economic disparities through clusters from the perspectives of symbiotic unit cultivation,relationship shaping,and environmental optimization,expanding the boundaries of symbiosis theory within the field of coordinated regional development.Third,it employs a quasi-natural experiment design and a large county-level dataset with rigorous causal identification strategies,providing a new methodological perspective on how cluster development reduces economic gaps.