Research on the Impact of the New Urbanization Comprehensive Pilot Policy on the New Quality Productivity of AgricultureBased on the Panel Data of Prefecture-Level Cities in Sichuan Province

New urbanization is an important engine to enhance the level of agricultural modernization, which is significantly important for promoting new quality productive forces in agriculture and facilitating integrated urban-rural development. This paper utilizes the integrated pilot policy for new urbanization as a quasi-natural experiment and employs a time-varying difference-in-differences (DID) model to investigate the impact and mechanism of the pilot policy for new urbanization on new quality productive forces in agriculture in Sichuan Province based on the panel data of 18 prefecture-level cities in Sichuan Province from 2012 to 2022. The results show that: (1) New urbanization substantially enhances the level of new quality productive forces in agriculture of the pilot areas. And the conclusion still holds after a series of robustness tests. (2) Mechanistic analysis finds that new urbanization promotes the new quality productive of agriculture through optimizing labor allocation and promoting green and intelligent development of agriculture. (3) The results of the heterogeneity analysis shows that the new urbanization has a more remarkable effect on the enhancement of new quality productive forces in agriculture in areas where the Engel’s coefficient of rural residents and the income disparity between urban and rural residents are large, as well as in the economic zone of southern Sichuan. (4) Further research reveals that new urbanization boosts integrated urban-rural development while promoting the development of agricultural new quality productive force and reducing the urban-rural gap, and that it significantly contributes to the development of new quality productive force in areas with high levels of integrated urban-rural development.