Crop-system resilience and fertilizer-use intensity in rice-wheat-maize production under regional digital economic development in China

Abstract

Resilience of crop production depends on productivity, water and mechanical capacity, crop diversity, chemical-input pressure and resistance to natural-disaster loss. This study evaluated rice-wheat-maize production systems in 30 Chinese provincial-level regions during 2014-2021. A six-indicator crop production system resilience (CPSR) index was constructed using entropy weights on 233 complete province-year observations. Two-way fixed-effects models showed no detectable average association between regional digital economy development and CPSR (β = -0.0150, p = 0.638), and none of six component associations survived false-discovery-rate adjustment. In a plant-input analysis, a one-standard-deviation increase in digital-finance usage depth was associated with 57.5 kg/ha lower fertilizer intensity (p = 0.0148); the direction persisted across sample, lag, outlier and influence checks but weakened under province-specific trends. Digital development was therefore more clearly related to fertilizer-use intensity than to short-run system-wide crop resilience.

Bangladesh J. Bot. 55(3): 623-629, 2026 (September)