Strengthening or Weakening: The Impact of an Aging Rural Workforce on Agricultural Economic Resilience in China

Rapid population aging has serious implications for socio-economic development and poses considerable challenges to food security and agricultural economic resilience, issues that are not well understood to date. Against the background of the aging agricultural labor force in China, this paper, based on the sample data of 30 provinces in China from 2011 to 2020, constructs a spatial autoregressive model and uses the generalized moment method to measure the development level of agricultural economic resilience in China. Moreover, the GMM model and intermediary effect model are used to empirically analyze the impact of rural labor aging on agricultural economic resilience in China and its role channels. The results show that the aging of China’s rural labor force is on the rise, and the resilience level of China’s agricultural economy is on the decline. The aging of the rural labor force significantly weakened the resilience of the agricultural economy; the aging level of the rural labor force increased by 1 unit, and the resilience of the agricultural economy decreased by 1.085 units. The results of this mechanistic analysis show that the aging of the rural labor force mainly weakens the resilience of the agricultural economy by reducing rural human capital and restraining agricultural scale management and agricultural technology progress. Our heterogeneity analysis shows that the aging of the rural labor force has a stronger inhibitory effect on the resilience of the agricultural economy in western regions, non-grain-producing areas, and areas with low economic development levels. This means that the government should pay attention to the impact of the aging rural labor force on the resilience of the agricultural economy, focusing on solving problems such as low agricultural production efficiency and insufficient rural human capital.