Rice yield response to climate and price policy in high-latitude regions of China

Abstract

Climate change has renewed interest in the production capacity of agriculture. Few researchers paid attention to price policy and heteroscedasticity in yield model. We incorporate rice price policy into the yield model at the expected price using a Tobit procedure and take Kalman filter theory to explore useful information, and then estimate the rice yield response to climate and rice price using a spatial autoregressive combined model in high-latitude regions of China from 1992 to 2018. Meanwhile, we apply two different Breusch-Pagan tests to examine heteroscedasticity. Our results suggest that spatial correlation of the error term is a more critical source of heteroscedasticity and cannot be completely solved by only allowing spatially autocorrelated errors due to possible technology diffusion effects. The results also show that rice price support policy is useful for constructing rice expected prices, and the price elasticities of rice and corn on rice yield are 0.194 and -0.097, respectively. Among climate variables, the total growing degree days in the growing season has positive effects, and monthly accumulated growing degree days also matter, especially in June. Precipitation in July and August has a significant effect with an inverse U shape. Projections of future climate change suggest that rice yield will mainly increase, ranging from 0.095% to 1.769%, but the rate of increase in yield will slow down in the higher-rate global warming. This study shows how price policy could be incorporated into yield response model and highlights the importance of climate factors and crop price policy for rice yield.