Agricultural machinery capacity and input intensities in China: evidence across fertilizer categories, diesel, pesticide, and plastic film

Abstract

Total agricultural machinery power records installed capacity rather than utilization or engineering efficiency. We examine its association with eight input intensities across 31 provincial-level regions in mainland China. The source panel spans 2000–2024, while the cross-input benchmark uses an exact common sample of 616 province-year observations for 2000–2019. Province and year fixed-effects models control for macroeconomic conditions, crop composition, irrigation, and disaster exposure. Inference combines province-clustered standard errors, Benjamini–Hochberg false-discovery-rate adjustment evaluated at q  < 0.10, and 9,999-replication restricted wild-cluster tests. Agricultural diesel has the clearest positive elasticity (0.400; clustered p  = 0.0087; q  = 0.0695; wild-bootstrap p  = 0.0005). The phosphate-fertilizer category has a positive point estimate but does not pass the multiplicity and bootstrap checks; total fertilizer, potash fertilizer, compound fertilizer, pesticide, and plastic film are indistinguishable from zero. Pairwise cross-equation tests confirm two unadjusted contrasts involving diesel, but none of the 28 differences survives false-discovery adjustment. Longer windows do not produce a general fertilizer response. The results identify a fuel association and several input-specific patterns; they do not estimate an efficiency-induced rebound or a causal effect of machinery.