Forest policy classification is critical to conducting comparisons and understanding performance variations across cases. Chinese-style forest policy has been in a black box to many outsiders, who tend to assume a decentralization policy model due to a great diversity of forest and socio-economic conditions in China. To test this hypothesis, we used the policy prescriptiveness framework to classify on-the-ground forest practice policies in central government and eight provinces, covering extensive territorial variations. We found that the eight subnational cases that implemented local policies appeared to be consistent with central policies, but there were also subtle differences within them. Our findings show that China utilized centralized and top-down policy models.

Rural labor out-migration and low comparative returns to grain challenge food security in China. This study examines the association between agricultural machinery services (AMS) and the allocation of sown land between grain and economic crops, and whether farmland rent is linked to a countervailing pattern. Using data from the 2021 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) for 421 villages and 5496 farming households, supplemented by the 2019 wave for the instrumental-variable analysis and additional diagnostics, we estimate province fixed-effects and instrumental-variable models. Greater AMS coverage is associated with a lower economic-crop share. Grain-specific service intensity is positively associated with relative gross sales revenue from grain and with farmland rent. Higher rent is positively associated with the economic-crop share in villages with active rental markets, but the estimated rent-related indirect association is imprecise: its bootstrap confidence interval includes zero. The data do not provide robust evidence that the rent association diminishes at higher rent levels. The association between AMS coverage and the economic-crop share is more negative in villages with better irrigation. These findings suggest that machinery services are linked to grain-oriented cropping, while the possible land-market feedback requires further investigation.

Against the backdrop of global forest degradation and timber supply constraints, improving green production efficiency in forestry while securing timber supply is an important challenge for sustainable forest management. Treating China’s National Reserve Forest Policy (NRFP) as a quasi-natural experiment, this study uses panel data for 114 prefecture-level cities from 2011 to 2022, including 67 treated and 47 control cities. We employ a staggered difference-in-differences estimator based on group-time average treatment effects, together with transmission-channel analysis, difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD), and a spatial difference-in-differences–spatial Durbin model (Spatial DID-SDM). The baseline estimates yield an overall ATT of 0.0149, indicating an average increase of 0.0149 index points in forestry GTFP for treated cities relative to the estimated counterfactual without the NRFP. This effect is approximately 1.49% of the sample mean of forestry GTFP (0.998) and remains stable across multiple robustness and sensitivity checks. NRFP implementation is separately associated with increases in capital deepening (CD) and physical labor productivity (PLP), while the lagged values of CD and PLP are each positively associated with forestry GTFP; these results are consistent with CD and PLP as potential transmission channels. The estimated NRFP effect is significantly weaker in resource-based cities and significantly stronger in economy-efficiency-oriented regions. Spatial effect decomposition shows that both the direct and indirect effects of the NRFP are positive and statistically significant. Under the alternative spatial weight matrix, both effects retain their direction and statistical significance, while the magnitude of the indirect effect remains broadly stable, suggesting that the positive spatial spillover effect of the NRFP on forestry GTFP is reasonably robust to the spatial weight matrix specification. These findings provide city-level empirical evidence for evaluating NRFP performance and informing differentiated policy design.