Objective By measuring the income-increasing effect of southern economic forest industry, exploring its influencing factors, this paper aims to find paths for improving the quality and efficiency of southern economic forest industry, and provide a new perspective for boosting rural revitalization and promoting high-quality and sustainable development of regional forestry.

Method Based on the internal mechanism of income-increasing effect of economic forest industry, an influencing factor model for income-increasing effect of economic forest industry was constructed. Taking Hunan, Jiangxi, and Guangdong provinces as examples, the Tobit standard regression model and spatial lag model were used to conduct an empirical analysis on the panel data of economic forest industry in the three provinces from 2001 to 2022. This study calculated the income-increasing effect and lag effect of southern economic forest industry and analyzed the main influencing factors of its income growth.

Result (1) The income-increasing effect of southern economic forest industry driven by industrial, technological, financial, and other policies was generally significant. However, there were differences in intensity and structural direction of the effect due to factors such as regional forestry resource endowments, economic development levels, and fiscal and credit conditions. (2) The income-increasing effect of southern economic forest industry exhibited regional heterogeneity due to differences in regional economic forest-driven types, manifested as regional imbalance. (3) Affected by factors such as industrial structure, proportion of economic forests, and income structure, the income-increasing effect had a lag period of 1 to 2 phases, reflecting temporal and spatial lag.

Conclusion The rapid development of southern economic forest industry is conducive to the income growth of forest farmers, but the income-increasing effect is affected by the regional economic niche, showing differences, heterogeneity and lag. Different measures should be taken for varied manifestations: (1) regarding the differences in income-increasing effect of the economic forest industry, targeted optimization policies should be formulated in terms of strengthening financial support, enhancing scientific and technological research and development, improving financial credit, and promoting land transfer to address the issues of intensity and structure of income-increasing effect. (2) Concerning the heterogeneity of efficiency-increasing effect, combined with the causes of differences among Hunan, Jiangxi, and Guangdong provinces, targeted measures should be adopted in accordance with local conditions to strengthen the transmission of income-increasing effect and help increaing the income of forest farmers. (3) In view of the lag of income-increasing effect, efforts should be made to activate the lag effect by deepening the market-oriented mechanism of economic forest industry, establishing a closed-loop interest linkage mechanism, and strengthening the risk prevention and control mechanism, so as to ensure the sustainability and efficiency of forest farmers’ output and income growth.