Disease Outbreak, Health Scare, and Distance Decay: Evidence from HPAI Shocks in Chinese Meat Sector.

Background: During zoonotic disease shocks (ZDSs), zoonotic disease outbreaks (ZDOs) can induce public health scares (PHSs), causing meat price risks (MPRs). Nevertheless, spatial spillovers of zoonotic disease shocks in meat markets remain unclear. We explore how zoonotic disease outbreaks and public health scares locally and spatially spill over to meat price risks, and whether spatial spillovers of public health scares decay with distance. Methods: (i) We construct a long panel covering 30 provinces and 121 months, using highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) epidemics as exogenous shocks in Chinese meat sector. (ii) We decompose zoonotic disease shocks into zoonotic disease outbreaks (objective incident) and public health scares (subjective information) and examine their spillovers to meat price risks. (iii) We identify distance-decaying spatial spillovers of public health scares, by running our dynamic SAR models 147 times, from 80 km to 3000 km with 20 km as incremental value, in a setting with risk-level heterogeneity. Results: (i) Zoonotic disease outbreaks themselves only cause local and neighboring meat price risks for high-risk meat, not for low-risk or substitute meat. (ii) Public health scares exacerbate local and neighboring meat price risks for high-risk and low-risk meat, and local meat price risks for substitute meat. (iii) Spatial spillovers of public health scares are distance-decaying and U-shaped, with four spatial attenuation boundaries, and distance turning point is shorter for high-risk meat (500 km) than for low-risk meat (800 km). Conclusions: We complement the literature by arguing that health scares induced by disease outbreaks negatively spill over to meat prices, with U-shaped distance-decaying spatial effects. This suggests low interregional spatial market integration in meat products, due to distance decay of nonstandardized information and local government control effects, across provincial boundaries. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to document nonmonotonic distance decay of health scare effects on food prices, previously not found by the literature.

Spatiotemporal matching between medical resources and population ageing in China from 2008 to 2017.

BACKGROUND: Globally, the increasingly severe population ageing issue has been creating challenges in terms of medical resource allocation and public health policies. The aim of this study is to address the space-time trends of the population-ageing rate (PAR), the number of medical resources per thousand residents (NMRTR) in mainland China in the past 10 years, and to investigate the spatial and temporal matching between the PAR and NMRTR in mainland China. METHODS: The Bayesian space-time hierarchy model was employed to investigate the spatiotemporal variation of PAR and NMRTR in mainland China over the past 10 years. Subsequently, a Bayesian Geo-Detector model was developed to evaluate the spatial and temporal matching levels between PAR and NMRTR at national level. The matching odds ratio (OR) index proposed in this paper was applied to measure the matching levels between the two terms in each provincial area. RESULTS: The Chinese spatial and temporal matching q-statistic values between the PAR and three vital types of NMRTR were all less than 0.45. Only the spatial matching Bayesian q-statistic values between the PAR and the number of beds in hospital reached 0.42 (95% credible interval: 0.37, 0.48) nationwide. Chongqing and Guizhou located in southwest China had the highest spatial and temporal matching ORs, respectively, between the PAR and the three types of NMRTR. The spatial pattern of the spatial and temporal matching ORs between the PAR and NMRTR in mainland China exhibited distinct geographical features, but the geographical structure of the spatial matching differed from that of the temporal matching between the PAR and NMRTR. CONCLUSION: The spatial and temporal matching degrees between the PAR and NMRTR in mainland China were generally very low. The provincial regions with high PAR largely experienced relatively low spatial matching levels between the PAR and NMRTR, and vice versa. The geographical pattern of the temporal matching between the PAR and NMRTR exhibited the feature of north-south differentiation.