Effects of agricultural informatization on agricultural carbon emissions: a quasi natural experiment study in China

ABSTRACT

Agricultural informatization is regarded as a useful instrument for reducing carbon emissions, but few studies are devoted to illustrating the real effects and mechanisms of it in detail. In this paper, agricultural informatization policy (AIP) is regarded as an exogenous shock, TVDID (time-varying Difference-in-difference) method and county-level panel data from 2000 to 2018 in China are used to investigate the effects of agricultural informatization on agricultural carbon emissions. It shows that AIP reduces agricultural carbon emissions by 1.4% significantly. Technologies adoption and farmland enlarging are potential mechanisms for these effects. Education level and broadband accession can improve the effects of carbon reduction. The effects of AIP on carbon reduction are more salient for the eastern and main-grain-producing areas. This paper implies that agricultural informatization could be essential for local agricultural carbon reduction.

KEYWORDS:

• Agricultural informatization policy
• agricultural carbon emissions
• technologies adoption
• planting areas enlarging

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• Q18
• Q54
• Q56

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#.

² https://www.fao.org/3/ca4887zh/ca4887zh.pdf.

³ The data come from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States, the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Ecology at Nanjing Agricultural University, IPC as well as the School of Biology and Technology, China Agricultural University.

⁴ The expenditure of posts and telecommunications in 1949 is the earliest data after the founding of P.R, China. It is also recognized by the official authority. However, this data is time-invariant. Enlightened by (Kantor and Whalley 2019), we multiply it with year in to generate a new variable as IV.