Abstract
Raw milk powder is one of most important raw materials for dairy processing and manufacturing. In the past decade, the rapid growth of imported raw milk powder (IMP) consumption has brought about significant impacts on China’s social economy. For more in-depth analysis of such impacts, this study develops a comprehensive IMP consumption model for China covering 2007–2015 based on the input-output analysis method from the perspective of material metabolism. In detail, material flows and consumption analysis are employed to reveal the direct and indirect IMP consumption and supply of various sectors. Using an innovative hierarchy analysis and network utility analysis, the internal structure of the IMP consumption system and consumption relationships between different sectors are identified. Due to the increasing intensive production activities between the manufacture and processing of the dairy products sector and others, its downstream sectors have grown rapidly and the consumption relationships with others are mostly mutualism. The surge in IMP has caused dramatic changes in consumption relationships, which has the greatest impact on the service sectors, followed by manufacturing sectors. The rapid increase in IMP consumption has put great pressure on the supply and consumption of intermediate products of many sectors.
Highlights
As the world’s largest importer of dairy products, China imported 0.72 million tons of raw milk powder in 2017, accounting for about 29.0% of China’s total international trade in dairy products [1]
For a well-developed metabolism system, the hierarchical map drawn by the forward linkage of various sectors should have an almost perfect pyramid shape (Note: The upstream industries are at the bottom and the downstream industries are at the top)
A comprehensive model of the imported raw milk powder (IMP) consumption has been developed and applied to China from the perspective of material metabolism to explore the impact of the rapid increase in IMP consumption on China’s socio-economic system
Summary
As the world’s largest importer of dairy products, China imported 0.72 million tons of raw milk powder in 2017, accounting for about 29.0% of China’s total international trade in dairy products [1]. Many scholars have done a lot of research on the impact of the surge of IMP on China’s social and economy and the development of China’s dairy industry [9] Most of these studies are at the stage of surface data interpretation and phenomena elaboration [2,10], and there is limited deep analysis from the perspective of the socio-economic system and material metabolism [11,12,13]. Environmentally-extended input-output analysis (EEIOA) [14,15] provides a way to amplify the invisible complex material flows from the perspective of urban metabolism through the economic flow characteristics of the input-output tables [16,17] Based on this method, it is possible to describe the complex material flows caused by commodities trade among various economic sectors and to reveal the internal structure of a regional metabolism system [18,19]. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes an overview of China’s import of raw milk powder, Section 3 shows the methodology and data applied in this study, Section 4 analyses the detailed results, Section 5 discusses the results, and Section 6 summaries the conclusions
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