National Reserve Forest Policy and Forestry Green Total Factor Productivity: Evidence from Prefecture-Level Cities in China
Abstract
Against the backdrop of global forest degradation and timber supply constraints, improving green production efficiency in forestry while securing timber supply is an important challenge for sustainable forest management. Treating China’s National Reserve Forest Policy (NRFP) as a quasi-natural experiment, this study uses panel data for 114 prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2022, including 67 treated and 47 control cities. We employ a staggered difference-in-differences estimator based on group-time average treatment effects, together with transmission-channel analysis, difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD), and a spatial difference-in-differences–spatial Durbin model (Spatial DID-SDM). The baseline estimates yield an overall ATT of 0.0149, indicating an average increase of 0.0149 index points in forestry GTFP for treated cities relative to the estimated counterfactual without the NRFP. This effect is approximately 1.49% of the sample mean of forestry GTFP (0.998) and remains stable across multiple robustness and sensitivity checks. NRFP implementation is separately associated with increases in capital deepening (CD) and physical labor productivity (PLP), while the lagged values of CD and PLP are each positively associated with forestry GTFP; these results are consistent with CD and PLP as potential transmission channels. The estimated NRFP effect is significantly weaker in resource-based cities and significantly stronger in economy-efficiency-oriented regions. Spatial effect decomposition shows that both the direct and indirect effects of the NRFP are positive and statistically significant. Under the alternative spatial weight matrix, both effects retain their direction and statistical significance, while the magnitude of the indirect effect remains broadly stable, suggesting that the positive spatial spillover effect of the NRFP on forestry GTFP is reasonably robust to the spatial weight matrix specification. These findings provide city-level empirical evidence for evaluating NRFP performance and informing differentiated policy design.