The Impact of Understory Economy Development on Farmers’ Income: An Empirical Analysis Based on Chinese Provincial Panel Data

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_47How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Understory economy; Industrial integration; Farmers’ income; Regional heterogeneity

Abstract

The understory economy, an eco-friendly form of compound management under forest canopy, has been expected to broaden farmers’ income channels and consolidate poverty-alleviation achievements in China. Using panel data from 31 Chinese provinces over 2013–2023, this paper takes understory-economy density (output per unit of forest area) as the core explanatory variable and constructs a two-way fixed-effects model to examine its income effect, transmission mechanism, and sectoral differences. The results show that an increase in understory-economy density significantly raises rural residents’ per-capita disposable income, robust across winsorization, variable replacement, exclusion of municipalities, sample-period adjustment, and lagged-variable tests. Mechanism analysis indicates that the effect is transmitted mainly through the industrial-integration channel, with agricultural output expansion acting as a full mediator. Composition decomposition shows that the effect is mainly carried by the economic-forest-fruit-tea-flower category, while narrow understory farming contributes less. The income effect is significantly positive across all regions, with higher coefficients in the eastern and northern regions. The paper suggests consolidating the advantages of the economic-forest-fruit-tea-flower sector, improving benefit-linkage mechanisms, strengthening regionally differentiated support, and prioritizing narrow understory farming in the next stage.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Juefei Xu
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/11/10
TI  - The Impact of Understory Economy Development on Farmers’ Income: An Empirical Analysis Based on Chinese Provincial Panel Data
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Public Service, Economic Management and Sustainable Development (PESD 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 480
EP  - 490
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_47
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-825-2_47
ID  - Xu2026
ER  -