The Dual Effects of Industrial Support Policies on Farmers’ Income under the Rural Revitalization Strategy

Under the background of rural revitalization strategy, the implementa-tion effect of industrial support policies (subsidies for special industries, con-struction of industrial parks, skills training, etc.) as the core means to promote the income of farm households has attracted widespread attention, especially in terms of the impact of the policies on the income disparity of farm households, which is characterized by the “Matthew effect” (exacerbating the gap) and the “universal effect” (narrowing the gap). In particular, regarding the impact of policies on the income gap between farmers, there is a dispute between the “Matthew effect” and the “universal effect”. This paper takes the industrial support policy as the re-search object, aims to identify the net effect of the policy on the income growth of farm households by utilizing the Fuzzy Discontinuity Regression Design (Fuzzy RDD), and explores its heterogeneous effects on farm households of different in-come levels, to clarify the direction of the policy’s effect on the income gap. The study deals with the problem of non-complete jumps in the probability of policy intervention by dividing the treatment group (supported by the policy) and the control group (unsupported) through the “eligibility cutoff” of the policy imple-mentation (the level of economic development of the region), and constructs an RDD model to estimate the policy effect. The results show that the policy signifi-cantly promotes the income growth of farm households, but in terms of heteroge-neity of effects, the income increase effect is expected to be stronger for high-income farm households (or vice versa). Based on this, this paper combines the mechanism analysis to put forward targeted policy optimization suggestions to provide a reference for improving the precision and fairness of industrial support policies.