Abstract:Abstract:There is a greater relationship between farmers' income increase and agricultural science and technology innovation ability, which is even more inseparable from the improvement of ecological efficiency, while farmers' income increase is related to the progress of the society as well as the improvement of people's quality of life. Based on the time series information of Hunan Province during the period of 2000-2020, this paper carries out an empirical analysis of the correlation between the level of agricultural science and technology innovation, ecological efficiency and the quality of income increase of farm households by using the panel vector autoregression (VAR) model, and adopting various means such as cointegration test, Granger test, variance decomposition, and so on. The results show that there is a significant bi-directional positive relationship between agricultural science and technology innovation and the quality of farm household income increase, indicating that science and technology innovation significantly promotes the economic growth of farm households while improving the efficiency and quality of agricultural production. However, the relationship between eco-efficiency and the quality of farm household income increase is statistically insignificant, implying that the improvement of eco-efficiency fails to be significantly transformed into economic gains for farm households in the short term. Impulse response and variance decomposition analyses further deepen the understanding of the dynamic relationship between agricultural science and technology innovation, eco-efficiency and the quality of farm household income increase. Impulse response analysis reveals that the impact of agricultural science and technology innovation on the quality of farm household income increase is immediate and significant, and stable over time. The variance decomposition analysis, on the other hand, shows that the role of agricultural science and technology innovation significantly outweighs that of ecological efficiency in predicting the quality of farm household income increment, highlighting the centrality of science and technology innovation in the current agricultural development and the long-term and indirect nature of the role of ecological efficiency. Therefore, this study proposes corresponding policy recommendations in terms of long-term planning for eco-efficiency improvement, strengthening support and investment in agricultural science and technology innovation, and enhancing farmers' awareness of eco-environmental protection.