AIR POLLUTION, CLIMATE CHANGE AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION IN CHINA

• Sponsoring Institution: National Institute of Food and Agriculture
• Project Status: COMPLETE
• Funding Source: HATCH
• Reporting Frequency: Annual
• Accession No.: 1004906
• Project Start Date: Oct 31, 2014
• Project End Date: Sep 30, 2019
• Program Code: [(N/A)]- (N/A)

Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, DAVIS
410 MRAK HALL
DAVIS,CA 95616-8671

Performing Department
Agricultural and Resource Economics

Non Technical Summary
Air pollution in China has reached alarming levels in recent years. As a result, it became a serious concern not only the Chinese government and its people, but for the world as a whole. This project's first motivation is to evaluate the quality of Chinese air pollution data, since there are legitimate reasons to suspect irregularities in the data. The second motivation of the project is to understand the impact of air pollution and climate change on agricultural yields in China.Air Pollution in China and California's Air Quality. One of the reasons why China's air pollution is a global concern is that air pollution is one of these problems that does not stay at `home'. Several studies have found traces of Asian air pollution in California. The failure or success of attempts to curb air pollution in China have a direct impact on California's air quality, which may have serious effects on health as well as other aspects of the public welfare in California.The Quality of China's Air Pollution Data and its Use in Scientific Studies. Determining the degree to which China's air pollution data is inaccurate and documenting its irregularities is important in informing which methods can be used in scientific studies to measure the effect of air pollution on other outcome variables. For the purposes of this project, the main outcome variable we are interested in is agricultural yields. However, the results to this question would inform other researchers with different outcome variables in mind.The relationship between air pollution, climate change and agriculture is inherently nonlinear, which means that the impact of extreme pollution levels or weather changes on agricultural yields is expected to be very different from the impact of moderate ones. Thus, one of the main contributions of this project to knowledge is to help understand this nonlinear relationship, since the levels of air pollution observed in China are not generally observed in other parts of the world or are observed at much lower frequencies.Understanding the Complex Relationship between Air Pollution, Climate Change and Agriculture. Since air pollution in China is a rising concern that is not expected to be mitigated significantly in the near future, the impact we find for recent yields is likely to be a good predictor for the trajectory of agricultural production in China in the near future. This is extremely relevant for California since China is an important export market for California's agricultural products. According to the UC Agricultural Issues Center, China is the third largest importer of California's agricultural imports in 2012, following Canada and the EU. China's imports of California's agriculture grew from about $638 million in 2007 to $2,341 million in 2005, i.e. they tripled in a mere five years. Hence, the findings of this project could help predict the growth in Chinese demand for California's agricultural products.

Animal Health Component

30%

Research Effort Categories

Basic

70%

Applied

30%

Developmental

(N/A)

Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)	Subject of Investigation (SOI)	Field of Science (FOS)	Percent
601	6050	3010	50%
901	7310	2090	50%

Knowledge Area
601 - Economics of Agricultural Production and Farm Management; 901 - Program and Project Design, and Statistics;

Subject Of Investigation
7310 - Experimental design and statistical methods; 6050 - Communities, areas, and regions;

Field Of Science
2090 - Statistics, econometrics, and biometrics; 3010 - Economics;

Keywords

air pollution

climate change

agricultural yields

china

Goals / Objectives
1. Determine the patterns of manipulation in Chinese air pollution data at the city-level.2. Identify heterogeneous patterns of manipulation in air pollution data across cities.3. Measure the proportion of manipulation in city-level air pollution data from China.4. Measure the effect of climate change and air pollution (specifically ground-level ozone and particulate matter) on agricultural yields in China.5. Identify the effect of climate change and pollutants on different crops, such as corn and rice, as well as different harvesting seasons.

Project Methods
1. Document city-level air pollution data and construct econometric procedures to test for the presence of manipulation.2. Develop a statistical/econometric model to examine whether manipulation behavior changes across time and cities with an eye toward the political economy aspects of the problem.3. Propose a method to estimate the proportion of manipulation in the city-level air pollution data in China.4. Construct a county-level longitudinal data set over a number of years that includes data on ground-level ozone, pollutants, weather variables, and agricultural yields.5. Develop a statistical/econometric model to measure the impact of air pollutants and climate variables on crop yields, controlling for other factors that influence yields.

Progress 10/31/14 to 09/30/19

Outputs
Target Audience:Academics and policymakers interested in environmental regulation in China; academics, policymakers and agribusiness community interested in China's agricultural production and potential implication for pollution impacts. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Xiaomeng Cui, a graduate student at the time of the beginning of this project, had the opportunity to work on two of the publications produced as part of this project. Several undergraduate students participated in the data collection on city party secretaries and mayors in China and thereby received research experience. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?The papers produced under this project were presented at the annual conferences of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics as well as the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. In addition, they were presented in seminars at various universities. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? 1. Document manipulation around blue-sky days in China 2. Document the patterns of manipulation in Chinese air pollution data at the city-level by measuring the proportion of manipulation for each city and year in our dataset. 3. Quantify the manipulation in China's air pollution data in terms of the number of manipulated blue-sky days. 4. Identify the key determinants of air pollution manipulation among party secretary and mayor characteristics in China. 5. Measure the effect of air pollution (specifically ground-level ozone) on rice yields in China. 6. Provide a detailed analysis of econometric issues that arise in climate change impact studies.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Dalia Ghanem, Junjie Zhang, "Effortless Perfection:" Do Chinese cities manipulate air pollution data?, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Volume 68, Issue 2, 2014, Pages 203-225.
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Colin A. Carter, Xiaomeng Cui, Aijun Ding, Dalia Ghanem, Fei Jiang, Fujin Yi & Funing Zhong , "Stage-specific, Nonlinear Surface Ozone Damage to Rice Production in China," Scientific Reports, Nature Publishing Group, Volume 7, Article number: 44224 (2017).
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Colin Carter, Xiaomeng Cui, Dalia Ghanem, Pierre M�rel, "Identifying the Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture," Annual Review of Resource Economics, 2018, 10:1, pp. 361-380.
• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: Dalia Ghanem, Shu Shen, Junjie Zhang, "A Censored Maximum Likelihood Approach to Quantifying Manipulation in China's Air Pollution Data", under revision at the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economics

Progress 10/01/17 to 09/30/18

Outputs
Target Audience:Academic economists working on climate change impacts. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?This project has provided several opportunities to co-author with a former graduate student Xiaomeng cui who is a co-author on the publication. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Journal article publication and working papers What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?I plan to ensure that the current working papers under review are published and that the results in the peer-reviewed articles are disseminated to a wider audience.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Completed several papers that are currently under review.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Colin Carter, Xiaomeng Cui, Dalia Ghanem, and Pierre Merel, "Identifying Economic Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Vol 10:361-380, October 2018.

Progress 10/01/16 to 09/30/17

Outputs
Target Audience:Academics, policymakers and agribusiness community interested in China's role in global commodity markets. Academics interested in methodological issues in the climate change impact studies. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Nothing Reported How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?- Presentation of the project "Turning a Blind Eye? On the Political Economy of Environmental Regulation in China" at the environmental economics seminar at UC San Diego - Presentation of the project "On Model Selection Criteria for Climate Change Impact Studies" at the econometrics seminar at UC San Diego as well as the Post-Selection Inference and Higher-order Asymptotics Conference at Washington University St. Louis What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?- I plan to work on publishing the existing papers in high-quality refereed journals. - I also plan to write on these papers in outreach journals to ensure the dissemination of these articles to a larger audience.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? New questions on the methodology of assessing climate change impacts have been identified and that produced a new paper.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Colin Carter, Xiaomeng Cui, Dalia Ghanem, Aijun Ding, Fei Jiang, Fujin Yi and Funing Zhong, "Stage-Specific, Nonlinear Surface Ozone Damage to Rice Production in China", Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group, 7:44224.

Progress 10/01/15 to 09/30/16

Outputs
Target Audience:policymakers and agribusiness community interested in China's role in global commodity markets Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?- In collecting the data set of Chinese mayor and secretary characteristics, we employed a number of undergraduate students as well as one graduate student that aided in data collection. - A working paper that was started last year "Stage-specific, nonlinear ozone damage to rice production in China" has undergone several rounds of revision and a graduate student co-author Xiaomeng Cui was able to participate in these rounds and learn the skills required to publish scientific papers. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?My co-author Colin Carter and I wrote an article on the blog of the China Policy Institute of University of Nottingham to draw attention to the importance of ozone regulation for China's rice production. (https://cpianalysis.org/2016/12/14/every-grain-of-rice-air-pollution-and-food-security-in-china/) What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In the next period, I plan to work on finalizing the working papers and publishing them as well as presenting them at conferences and communicating the results to a wider audience.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? A new goal was identified and achieved over the last year, which is the importance of political economy considerations in designing environmental regulations in China.

Publications

Progress 10/31/14 to 09/30/15

Outputs
Target Audience: Nothing Reported Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?Xiaomeng Cui, a graduate student working with me, has been a co-author on the rice yield project, and I believe it has been a great training opportunity for him. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Nothing Reported What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?The next steps for the project is to work on disseminating the results of the research in progress. Furthermore, I plan to use the data set on mayor and secretary characteristics to better understand the relationship between these characteristics and manipulation behavior in air pollution data in China. The next major goal is to examine current methods to identify climate change effects on yield and other important outcomes.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? There are two goals of this project that were accomplished: (1) a methodology has been proposed to estimate the proportion of manipulation in air pollution data in China, (2) the relationship between rice yields and ground-level ozone concentrations has been documented.

Publications

• Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2014 Citation: Dalia Ghanem and Junjie Zhang, "Effortless Perfection: Do Chinese Cities Manipulate Air Pollution Data?" Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (Lead Article), 68.2, p. 203-225.