Abstract
Understanding the influence of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy and the Chinese government's emergency measures to ease the economic impacts of viral spread can offer urgently-needed lessons while this virus continues to spread across the globe. Thus, this study collected over 750,000 words upon the topic of COVID-19 and agriculture from the largest two media channels in China: WeChat and Sina Weibo, and employed web crawler technology and text mining method to explore the influence of COVID-19 on agricultural economy and mitigation measures in China. The results show that: (1) the impact of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy at the very first phase is mainly reflected in eight aspects as crop production, agricultural products supply, livestock production, farmers' income and employment, economic crop development, agricultural products sales model, leisure agriculture development, and agricultural products trade. (2) The government's immediate countermeasures include resuming agricultural production and farmers' work, providing financial support, stabilizing agricultural production and products supply, promoting agricultural products sale, providing subsidies, providing agricultural technology guidance and field management, and providing assistance to poor farmers to reduce poverty. (3) The order of government's immediate countermeasures is not all in line with the order of impact aspects, which indicates that more-tailored policies should be implemented to mitigate the strikes of COVID-19 on China's agricultural economy in the future.
Highlights
As of May 8, 2020, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has infected 3,938,064 people and killed 276,863 worldwide
Based on over 750,000 words collected from WeChat and Sina Weibo, this study employed web crawler technology and text mining method to empirically estimate the impacts of COVID-19 on China’s agricultural economy and the Chinese government’s emergency measures to address these impacts
As COVID-19 continues to spread across the globe, it is essential to understand how China’s agricultural economy is affected by COVID-19 and what emergency measures are government used to mitigating these impacts
Summary
As of May 8, 2020, Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has infected 3,938,064 people and killed 276,863 worldwide. The literature above provided important understandings of the impacts of this novel virus on China’s agricultural economy and the Chinese government’s immediate mitigation measures These studies mainly used traditional research methods, such as qualitative analysis or questionnaire surveys. Based on over 750,000 words collected from WeChat and Sina Weibo, this study employed web crawler technology and text mining method to empirically estimate the impacts of COVID-19 on China’s agricultural economy and the Chinese government’s emergency measures to address these impacts. No studies have ever used web crawler technology and text mining method to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on China’s agricultural economy and the government’s emergent mitigation measures. We fill this gap and contribute to future studies.
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