Enhancing agricultural environmental performance: Exploring the interplay of agricultural productive services, resource allocation, and marketization factors

Exploring the factors that affect agricultural environmental performance enriches our understanding of the environmental implications of agricultural practices. Using panel data for 79 prefecture-level cities in the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River in China from 2003 to 2020, this study theoretically determines and empirically tests the relationship between agricultural productive services, resource allocation, and agricultural environmental performance. The results show that agricultural productive services can significantly improve agricultural environmental performance. Marketization process has a positive moderating function on the direct effect of agricultural productive services on agricultural environmental performance, which increases with the improvement of marketization process. While marketization process has a significant moderating function on the mediating effect of labor misallocation and capital misallocation in both the first and second halves of the path, marketization has a significant moderating function on the mediating effect of land misallocation in the first half of the path. Based on results, we provide reference for agricultural policymakers, especially in countries dominated by smallholder farmers, to design policies on agricultural productive services, agricultural resource allocation, and market-oriented reforms, as well as to formulate differentiated agricultural environmental performance policies.