Impact of agricultural insurance on green agricultural production in China: Based on the mediation effect of agricultural technology progress

[Objective] Under the background of comprehensive green transformation of economic and social development, encouraging and developing agricultural insurance plays an important role in promoting green agricultural production, realizing high-quality agricultural development, and promoting rural revitalization and construction in China. [Methods] Firstly, we try to construct a research framework of Cobb-Douglas production function including agricultural insurance, agricultural technology progress and green agricultural production, and theoretically analyze the channels of agricultural insurance on green agricultural production. Secondly, based on the panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2011 to 2021, the index of green agricultural production level is constructed by entropy weight method, and the mixed regression, fixed effect and random effect and two-stage least squares method are used to empirically investigate the effect of agricultural insurance on green agricultural production by promoting agricultural technology progress. [Results] The study found that: (1) Agricultural insurance to promote agricultural technological progress is an important mechanism to promote green agricultural production ; the security of agricultural insurance can disperse the risks faced by agriculture, optimize the input of technical elements, eliminate traditional technologies with high pollution and high emissions, and produce substitution effects; the policy of agricultural insurance encourages farmers to pay for insurance through financial subsidies, improves the enthusiasm of farmers to grow crops, promotes the scale and mechanization of agriculture, and produces peer effects; (2) The effect of agricultural insurance on green agricultural production by promoting agricultural technological progress will show significant differences due to the different degrees of technological development in various provinces. Compared with regions with low agricultural green total factor productivity, agricultural insurance has a better effect on green agricultural production by promoting agricultural technology progress in regions with high agricultural green total factor productivity. Compared with areas with higher total power of agricultural machinery, the effect of agricultural insurance on green agricultural production by promoting agricultural technological progress is better in areas with lower total power of agricultural machinery. [Conclusion] The substitution effect and peer