The Role of Soil N2O Emissions in Agricultural Green Total Factor Productivity: An Empirical Study from China around 2006 when Agricultural Tax Was Abolished

Xiaocang Xu,Chengjie Liu,Lu Zhang,Linhong Chen

doi:10.3390/agriculture10050150

Xiaocang Xu, Chengjie Liu + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture10050150

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Abstract

The decision in 2006 to abolish the agricultural tax, which had lasted for thousands of years, contributed to the prosperity of agriculture, and with it the growing importance of soil N2O emissions in China. However, most of the previous literature ignored soil N2O emissions due to their too small share in total agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper attempts to take soil N2O emissions as an important variable in the measurement of agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP), which incorporates environmental pollution into the analytical framework of agricultural production efficiency. Three impressive results were found. Firstly, soil N2O emissions play an increasingly important role in agricultural GHG emissions. The proportion of soil N2O emissions in agricultural GHG emissions increased from 4.52% in 1998 to 4.83% in 2006, and then to 5.36% in 2016. Secondly, the regional difference of soil N2O emissions in AGTFP is visible. In 2016, although soil N2O emissions accounted for a small proportion (about 5%) of the total agricultural GHG emissions in China, the AGTFP including soil N2O emissions was much lower than that excluding soil N2O emissions, especially in areas with high agricultural and population density. Finally, over time, soil N2O emissions have had an increasing effect on AGTFP. Compared with 1998–2006, the impact of excluding soil N2O emissions on AGTFP in 2007–2016 was more evident than that including soil N2O emissions.

Highlights

The prosperity and development of agriculture in China has entered a new stage since the abolition, in 2006, of the agricultural tax, which had lasted for two thousand years. [1]
Most of them focused on the effects of factors such as soil properties and soil temperature on soil Nitrous oxide (N2 O) emissions [44,45], and little literature discusses its role in Agricultural green production efficiency due to its too small share in total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or treated it as just one of several GHG emissions sources from agriculture [8,24]
The decision in 2006 to abolish the agricultural tax, which had lasted for two thousand years, contributed to the prosperity of agriculture, and with it the growing importance of soil N2 O emissions in China

Summary

Introduction

The prosperity and development of agriculture in China has entered a new stage since the abolition, in 2006, of the agricultural tax, which had lasted for two thousand years. [1]. According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the total real value of China’s agriculture was 3.636 trillion yuan in 2005 and reached 5.856 trillion yuan in 2016, an increase of 61.06% [2]. In the process of China’s transformation from a big agricultural country to a power agricultural country, pollution generated by the development of agriculture has, in addition to industrial pollution and its impact on health, become one of the social concerns [3,4,5,6,7]. Developing low-carbon agriculture (which refers to agriculture with high efficiency, low energy consumption, and low emissions) is a necessary step for China to meet its commitment to reduce emissions in response to climate change and a necessary means to achieve sustainable development of agriculture. It is of considerable significance to analyze greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural production and their impact on agricultural total factor productivity

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