Agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, and technological innovation: A comprehensive quantile analysis

Abstract

This paper investigates the asymmetric inter-linkages and causality between agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, and technological innovation in four main agricultural countries i.e., China, the United States, Japan and Canada, by employing monthly data from 1990 to 2019. Accordingly, Quantile-on-Quantile (QQ) regression and two causality-in-quantile approaches are applied to conduct a comprehensive quantile analysis of the asymmetric relationship for all quantiles of the above distribution. Our results exhibit a positive association between agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, and technological innovation in China, the United States and Canada. Besides, the strength of the positive association depends largely on the development level of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, and technological innovation. However, except for the positive impact between fertilizer consumption and agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, I find a negative nexus between agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and technological innovation in Japan. Compared with the other three sample countries, Japan has done the best in agricultural greenhouse gas emission mitigation. The results also demonstrate that agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, and technological innovation follow a bidirectional quantile-causality relation in all sample countries. Overall, I find that fertilizer consumption does increase agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, and that technological innovation has not played a full role in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in most countries. Finally, our findings have significant implications for formulating reasonable emission reduction measures in the agricultural sector.