Influential Factors of Spatial Distribution of Wheat Yield in China During 1978–2007: A Spatial Econometric Analysis

Abstract

Wheat is an important staple food for China in terms of production and consumption; the increase of wheat productivity is critical to food self-sufficiency for China. The major objective of this paper is to examine the spatial distribution of wheat yields in China and then to analyze the underlying causes for the trends. For this purpose, we first apply methods of exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) to check the spatial and temporal patterns of wheat yields with a panel data set of 30 years over the main wheat production provinces in China. By Moran’s I scatter plots and local indicators of spatial association (LISA) map, it shows that spatial autocorrelation seems to affect wheat productivity and that the geographical distribution of high yields temporally varied. It also shows spatial and temporal variation differences of the location of the spatial cluster of wheat yields. Then, we use the spatial econometric modeling to further investigate the influential factors of the spatial and temporal variation differences of wheat productivity which intrinsically is a natural-social-economic composition affected by climate change and adaptive managements. The results suggest that the combination of spatial and statistical data in the spatial econometric modeling does provide more reliable impact assessments and analysis which could provide the provincial government a way to improve adaptive management to cope with the future climate change and keep the yield increasing.