Introduction: China’s traditional culture makes rural women and men take on different family responsibilities.Methods: Use “China Family Panel Studies” (CFPS) data and build Logit and propensity score matching models to empirically study the impact of children care and elderly care on rural married women going out to work. And explore the welfare effects of basic education public services in helping rural women take care of their families.Results: The results show that caring for children has a significant hindering effect on rural married women’s job hunting. Especially for those in low-income families, the employment inhibition is most significant among women aged 20–30 with multiple children. Contrary to previous cognition, supporting the elderly has a certain weak stimulating effect. The kindergarten public services in rural areas can help women take care of their children and relieve their work pressure. The primary school public services have not played a role in alleviating them.Discussion: This shows that there are still a large number of female laborers in rural China who are unable to go out to work due to family care. The improvement of rural basic education public services can promote more rural women going out to work. This finding will provide a policy reference for the introduction of a formal care system and the establishment of basic education public services in China.

The abrupt onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2019 significantly disrupted China’s domestic agricultural production and supply chain stability. Local governments, responding to urgent circumstances, implemented various trade restrictions that profoundly affected regional economic development. This study, covering data from 2010 to 2019 across 31 provinces, investigates agricultural market integration and regional economic development. Employing a dynamic spatial panel Durbin model, it systematically analyzes the complex relationship between these variables. International trade variables related to agricultural products are then introduced to examine their “substitution effect” in promoting regional economic development through agricultural market integration. The research findings are summarized as follows: (1) disregarding international agricultural trade, a one-unit increase in the agricultural market integration index corresponds to a 0.156% rise in regional economic development. (2) In an open economy, the substitution coefficients for agricultural imports, exports, and total trade concerning market integration are −0.00097, −0.0012, and −0.0038, respectively. (3) The strength of the substitution effect from the international agricultural market to the domestic market varies regionally, with coefficients of −0.00099 and −0.00217 for the eastern and western regions, respectively.