Abstract: Deepening the reform of the financial system is the basic guarantee for achieving high-quality agricultural development; while improving the public financial expenditure on agriculture, optimizing the structure and improving the performance are the inevitable requirements for realizing the goal. Therefore, under the background of rural revitalization stragety, this paper systematically expounds the multiple mechanisms among vertical fiscal imbalance, public finance supporting agriculture bias and high-quality agricultural development from the theoretical level. Based on China’s inter-provincial panel data from 2007 to 2019, it constructs a comprehensive measurement index system of high-quality agricultural development on the basis of the“Five Development Concepts”. The results show that the overall high-quality agricultural development index of China is rising slowly, the absolute level is not high, and there is obvious heterogeneity in innovation, coordination, greenness, opening up and sharing. It is found through the empirical survey that the vertical fiscal imbalance, the public finance supporting agriculture bias and the high-quality agricultural development all present a significant and direct negative correlation, and that while the vertical fiscal imbalance is extended, the public finance supporting agriculture is also significantly increased, producing a significant indirect inhibiting effect on the high-quality agricultural development. Therefore, it is necessary to reasonably control the level of vertical fiscalimbalance, increase the total amount of fiscal expenditure on agriculture and optimize the structure of fiscal expenditure on agriculture, and at the same time improve the performance evaluation system of local officials, so as to promote the high-quality agricultural development with “benign competition”.

Key words: fiscal decentralization, vertical fiscal imbalance, public finance supporting agriculture bias, high-quality agricultural development