The impact of climate change on agricultural economic resilience:Moderating effect of fiscal support for agriculture
Climate change has become one of the greatest threats to modern human society and economic development worldwide,particularly in the agricultural sectors of developing countries.In the context of addressing climate change,it is of great significance for China to effectively provide fiscal support for agriculture and enhance the resilience of the agricultural economy to realize high-quality development of agriculture in China.As a commonly used policy instrument,fiscal support for agriculture is regarded as an effective way to achieve these goals.However,research that quantifies the relationship between climate change and agricultural eco-nomic resilience or reveals the potential role of fiscal support for agriculture is limited.Therefore,based on a cross-country and county-level panel dataset from 2004 to 2020,which contains 1 326 counties(districts)from 30 provinces(including autonomous regions and municipalities,and excluding Xizang,Hong Kong,Macao,and Taiwan because of data availability issues)in China,we first applied a fixed-effect econometric model to empirically analyze the impact of climate change on agricultural economic resilience and then used a moderating effect model to test the moderating effects of fiscal support for agriculture therein.The hetero-geneity of both functional regions for grain production and the income levels of rural residents were also considered.The benchmark regression results indicated that climate change,which is mainly characterized by temperature rise or warming,has a negative impact on agricultural economic resilience.These results remained valid after a set of robustness tests.The moderating effects of fiscal support for agriculture were tested and proven to exist during the study period,which means that fiscal support for agriculture in China could effectively mitigate the negative impacts of climate change on agricultural economic resilience.From the perspectives of both func-tional regions for grain production and the income level of rural residents,heterogeneity analysis showed that the negative impacts of climate change on agricultural economic resilience are more pronounced in the main grain-consuming regions and low-income regions than in other functional or income-level regions in China.The regulatory role of fiscal support for agriculture is heteroge-neous.Fiscal support for agriculture exerted a more significant moderating effect in the main grain-producing and low-income regions during the study period,meaning that fiscal support for agriculture played a more effective role in mitigating the negative impacts of climate change in these regions than in other regions.Based on the research results,this study recommends that it is nece-ssary to continually optimize climate policy schemes and implement effective policy instruments in the agricultural sector to enhance agricultural economic resilience,as well as to put more effort into climate-adaptive measures by strengthening fiscal support for agri-culture.Additionally,regionally differentiated agricultural economic resilience enhancement programs should be considered to miti-gate the negative impacts of climate change on China's agricultural economic resilience and to better serve the high-quality develo-pment of agriculture in China.
agricultural economic resilienceclimate changefiscal support for agriculturemoderating effectsheterogeneity
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