ABSTRACT Enhancing the resilience is a core task for the agricultural industry, and inclusive finance is widely regarded as a key instrument. Based on the financial functions theory, this paper develops a theoretical framework for how inclusive finance affects the resilience of the agricultural industry and tests it using an unbalanced panel of 450 counties in China (2014–2022) within a two‐way fixed effects model. The results are as follows. First, a one‐unit increase in the level of inclusive finance is associated with a 0.1850 increase in the resilience of the agricultural industry, and this effect is significant at the 1% level. Second, by performing the core functions of resource allocation, risk management, and information intermediation, inclusive finance enhances the resilience of the agricultural industry through capital supply effect, labor productivity effect, and technology spillover effect. Third, compared with buffering capacity, inclusive finance exerts a stronger promoting effect on the recovery capacity and transformation capacity of the resilience of the agricultural industry. Fourth, the positive effect of inclusive finance on the resilience of the agricultural industry is heterogeneous across planting scales and is more pronounced in large‐scale planting areas. These findings suggest that policy efforts should focus on strengthening targeted credit, developing a multi‐level agricultural insurance system, and building agricultural credit information platforms. Since the analysis is based on county‐level data and the institutional background of China, any application of these results to other developing countries should take local conditions into careful account.
Peng et al. (Fri,) studied this question.