ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Sustain. Food Syst.

Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics

Diversified Food Supply Capacity and Rural Residents' Income in China: Evidence from Provincial Panel Data

• Yuxuan Wei ¹

• HN Hui Niu ²

• Ziyi Nian ¹

• PW Peng Wei ³

• YW Yiping Wu ¹

• 1. College of Economics and Management, Henan Agricultural University, Zhengzhou, China

• 2. Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, China

• 3. School of Economics and Management, Henan Vocational College of Water Conservancy and Environment, Zhengzhou, China

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Abstract

Against the backdrop of sustainable food-system transformation and China’s policy emphasis on an “all-encompassing approach to food”, whether a region’s combined capacity to supply multiple major food categories translates into higher rural incomes remains underexplored at the macro level. Using panel data for 31 provincial-level regions in China from 2008 to 2023, this study constructs an entropy-weighted composite index of diversified food supply capacity based on the per capita supply of seven major food categories and examines its association with rural residents’ real per capita disposable income using two-way fixed-effects models. We further use DEA to examine scale efficiency as a potential production-side mechanism and employ the one-period lag of Food as an instrument in two-stage least squares (2SLS) estimation to address potential endogeneity concerns. The results show a significant positive association between diversified food supply capacity and rural residents’ income. This finding is generally robust to alternative sample periods, estimation methods, and measures of the core explanatory variable. Mechanism analysis shows that Food is significantly positively associated with scale efficiency. When Food and ATP are jointly included in the income equation, the ATP coefficient is positive and Food remains significantly positively associated with income. Because provincial panel data are unlikely to satisfy the stringent identification assumptions required for causal mediation analysis, these findings are interpreted as mechanism-related evidence rather than precise estimates of causal mediation effects.

Summary

Keywords

Diversified food supply capacity, Regional heterogeneity, Rural residents' income, Scale efficiency, Sustainable food systems

Received

27 August 2026

Accepted

27 October 2026

Copyright

© 2026 Wei, Niu, Nian, Wei and Wu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Yiping Wu

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