Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p> Under the strategic goals of safeguarding national food security and promoting sustainable agricultural development, comprehensively improving agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP) has become a key lever for advancing China's agricultural and rural modernization. Based on panel data for 30 Chinese provinces and municipalities from 2011 to 2023, this paper employs a double machine learning model to systematically evaluate the causal effect and mechanism of digital village construction on AGTFP. The results show that digital village construction has a significant and robust direct promoting effect on AGTFP, and this conclusion remains valid after a series of robustness tests. Mediation tests indicate that digital village construction indirectly promotes AGTFP growth by improving agricultural technological innovation, with technological innovation playing a significant mediating role. Heterogeneity analysis reveals structural differences in this effect: the promoting effect is significant in low-openness provinces, major agricultural provinces, inland regions, non-pilot provinces, and resource-based provinces, but insignificant in high-openness provinces, non-major agricultural provinces, coastal regions, pilot provinces, and non-resource-based provinces. Further analysis based on the Haken model shows that within the digital village composite system, the 'governance and livelihood integration layer' acts as the dominant order parameter; its coordination with the 'economic and infrastructure foundation layer' remains at an initial stage and displays clear spatiotemporal differentiation. This paper provides new evidence for understanding the 'technology-institution-region' collaborative mechanism through which digital village construction promotes AGTFP, and offers important policy implications for advancing digital village construction by category and optimizing regional coordination paths. <bold>CLC number: F323 Document code: A</bold> </p>