The role of climate-adaptive technological innovation in promoting agriculture carbon efficiency: impact and heterogeneity in economic development.

Achieving global climate change mitigation targets requires low-carbon production in agriculture. In such an endeavor, a new classification of climate-adaptive technology is defined to affect agriculture towards the low-carbon direction, but such an impact has seldom been empirically tested in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the impact of climate-adaptive technological innovation on agricultural carbon efficiency, a proxy for low-carbon agriculture. We use a stochastic directional distance function framework and a cross-country dataset covering 38 OECD countries. Additionally, we test the heterogeneous impact, considering that regional economic development is a crucial condition for deploying advanced technologies. The findings show that climate-adaptive technological innovation can promote carbon efficiency in agriculture, and this aggregate effect hides significant heterogeneity at different levels of economic development. The higher the economic development level is, the better climate-adaptive technological innovation contributes to improving agricultural carbon efficiency. Then, related policy implications are set forth.

Does government information transparency contribute to pollution abatement? Evidence from 264 Chinese cities.

Government information transparency is taken as a prominent instrument of environmental regulation in Chinese cities, especially in the current digital age. However, polluters' strategic emission and production behaviors across cities, confronted with changing information disclosure level, might make the policy's effect unexpected in practice. While many existing studies have explored the impact of institutions on pollution, government information disclosure only attracted little attention from empirical studies. Using the method framework of the spatial Durbin model, this study empirically investigates the impact of government information transparency on sulfur dioxide emissions with samples of 264 Chinese cities from 2005 to 2012. We find that a city's government information transparency negatively relates to its local emission level of sulfur dioxide. Moreover, a city's sulfur dioxide emissions positively relate to its neighboring cities' government information transparency levels. The further calculations of marginal effects show that the average of such a direct and local impact of government information transparency outweighs the average indirect effect a city receives from its neighboring cities, making government information transparency benefits to pollution abatement in total.