The Role of Productive Agricultural Services in Carbon Reduction: Effects and Mechanisms
LUO Mingzhong1,2 WEI Binhui1
1. School of Economic and Management, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510642, China; 2. Rural Revitalization Laboratory, Key Laboratory of Philosophy and Social Sciences of Guangdong Province, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510642, China
Abstract A panel of 213 cities in China from 2003 to 2019 was selected and a two-way fixed-effects model was used to explore the impact of agricultural productive services on the level of agricultural carbon emissions and its mechanism of action. The study shows that agricultural productive services significantly contribute to agricultural carbon emission reduction, and the findings still hold after using instrumental variables to mitigate the endogeneity problem and conducting various robustness tests. Further analysis shows that agricultural productive services contribute more significantly to carbon reduction in the eastern and food-producing regions. Combining the “scale-structure-technology” logical framework, promoting large-scale operations, adjusting cropping structures and promoting technological progress are the main ways in which agricultural production services can reduce the level of agricultural carbon emissions. At the same time, the impact of agricultural production services on the level of agricultural carbon emissions has a significant negative spatial spillover effect, which helps to promote the reduction of agricultural carbon emissions in the surrounding areas and realise the overall optimisation of the ecological environment in the region. Therefore, the agricultural production service system should be further improved to realise the complementary advantages of service scale operation and land scale operation, and to strengthen inter-regional agricultural economic ties, so as to form a good situation of regional synergy in agricultural carbon emission reduction.
2023, Vol. 40 
