Abstract: Under the background of the Rural Revitalization Strategy, the green and sustainable development of agriculture is of great importance, and rural finance plays an important supporting role in this process. In this paper, we mainly study how rural finance development affects the agricultural green total factor productivity. Based on China's provincial panel data from 2000 to 2015, this paper uses the non-radial direction distance function and meta-frontier method to measure the agricultural green total factor productivity and its decomposition, and then applies the dynamic spatial panel model in the following empirical analysis. The results show that, overall, the GTFP presents different characteristics corresponding to the different regions and different time phases, and have significant spatial autocorrelation. The increase in the scale of rural financial development, the optimization of the structure of rural financial development and the improvement of the efficiency of rural financial development are all conducive to the promotion of GTFP, but our results also suggest that there are differences among the mechanisms. Specifically, increasing the scale of rural financial development is mainly to promote the agricultural GTFP through promoting agricultural technological progress and narrowing the technological gap; optimizing the rural financial development structure can promote the agricultural GTFP through improving technological efficiency, promoting technical progress and narrowing the technological gap; improving the efficiency of rural financial development can promote the agricultural GTFP through improving technological efficiency and promoting technological progress. On this base, we put forward some relevant policy recommendations for improving the agricultural GTFP from the perspective of rural financial development.

Key words: rural financial development, agricultural green total factor productivity, dynamic spatial, panel model