Factors on Spatial Heterogeneity of the Grain Production Capacity in the Major Grain Sales Area in Southeast China: Evidence from 530 Counties in Guangdong Province

Wei Fang,Boxi Yang,Heliang Huang,Qiang Hu

doi:10.3390/land10020206

Abstract

Grain security is an essential issue for countries across the world. China has witnessed over the last decades not only a rapid growth in the volume of the grain production, but also a divergence in its geographical distributions. Existing studies on the influencing factors of grain production have overlooked thus spatial heterogeneity. This paper investigates the factors that cause the geographical heterogeneity in grain output levels in Guangdong province of China, in terms of land, labor and capital. To address the spatial attenuation effect of the influencing factors, we use the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) on samples of different spatial ranges, which include a total of 530 southern counties from 2015 to 2017. The results show that (a) the effect of land endowment on grain output vary across the east and the west, and between coastal and inland areas; (b) the effect of labor endowment on grain output are inconsistent in the sign and magnitude of the estimates across counties; (c) the effect of agricultural capital on grain production shows heterogeneity spatially (across the east and the west) and economically (across developed and less developed regions). We then analyze the potential mechanism behind this spatial heterogeneity, as well as its policy implications.

Highlights

Since its reform and opening, China has witnessed rapid economic and social developments in the southeastern coastal area
We observe that the average value of the variance inflation factor (VIF) is close to 1, indicating that the selection of variables is reasonable and the collinearity issue is not a concern
When we scale up the sample to S, the increase in the degree of land standardization is accompanied with a significant drop in grain production level, at a 5% significance level

Summary

Introduction

Since its reform and opening, China has witnessed rapid economic and social developments in the southeastern coastal area. The de-agriculturalization and the de-grainization of cultivated land in this area are mainly the results of market allocation of land resources, the Chinese government has set policy goals to “maintain the food security in the main sales area.”. It is theoretically significant and empirically valuable to study the evolution of the grain production and the effects of factor endowments on grain output in the main sales areas. Historical evidence across the world shows that all the main sales areas of grain have experienced rapid economic development, scientific and technological progress, and reduction of rural industries brought about by global urbanization [1,2,3]. Given that change in land use is a process of human-induced spatial change, it is essential to take it into account the difference and complexity in the distribution of land-use patterns [11,12,13,14] and to precisely measure the different effects of changes in factors, such as labor, land and, technology, on food production in different regions [15,16,17,18]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion