Rural Road Infrastructure and Rural Economic Resilience in China: A Systems Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity and Boundary Conditions

Abstract

Rural economies increasingly face intertwined pressures from natural hazards, market volatility, supply-chain disruptions, and uneven regional development, making it important to understand how infrastructure is related to their capacity to resist, recover from, and adapt to shocks. This study examines the association between rural road infrastructure and rural economic resilience and assesses how this association varies across regions and under different technological, market, and risk conditions. Using a panel of 31 mainland Chinese provinces from 2013 to 2024, we construct a multidimensional resilience index and estimate two-way fixed-effects, interaction, difference GMM, and system GMM models. Within-province increases in rural-road provision are positively associated with rural economic resilience, and this relationship remains stable across alternative measures, sample restrictions, lagged specifications, and province-specific trends. The association is stronger in central and western China than in the eastern region and is also more pronounced in major grain-producing regions. Positive interaction estimates are observed for digital access, market circulation, and disaster exposure. Disaster exposure is negatively associated with resilience in levels but increases the conditional road–resilience slope. These patterns support a systems interpretation in which rural roads operate as physical connective infrastructure embedded in broader technological, market, and risk environments. The findings provide provincial-level evidence for differentiated assessment of rural-road strategies and integrated consideration of digital services, market circulation, and disaster-response systems.