In recent years, a growing body of literature has explored the determinants and impacts of sustainable agricultural technologies. However, little is known about the relationship between agricultural socialized services that have reshaped the smallholder agricultural system and promoted scale operation in rural China and environmentally friendly agricultural innovation adoption of the farm. Our study examines the effects of agricultural socialized services on the adoption of sustainable agricultural practices (SAPs). In this study, we capture the number of SAPs adopted, unlike most existing studies that analyze the dichotomous decision of agricultural technology adoption. We apply an endogenous-treatment Poisson regression model to analyze using a national representative farm-level survey data set with 1357 farm households from 132 villages in China. The results show that socialized service use has a significantly positive effect on the number of SAPs adopted. Our results suggest that agricultural socialized services can promote the adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies among smallholders, and thus help transform conventional agriculture into sustainable agriculture.

Although various previous studies have explored the relationship between agricultural service adoption and its economic impact, little is known about how it may affect environmental quality, especially chemical fertilizer application. Our study examines the effects of agricultural production services (APSs) on chemical fertilizer use, as well as the effects mediated by farm size, using a national representative survey data set comprising 1321 farm households from 132 villages in China. We show that farms adopting APSs tend to decrease the usage of chemical fertilizer and, thus, have less deviation from optimal chemical fertilizer application. Farms with large sizes are more likely to reduce the usage of chemical fertilizer. Moreover, farm size has a significant mediating effect on the relationship between APS adoption and chemical fertilizer use. In particular, farms adopting APSs are more likely to expand farm size, resulting in chemical fertilizer reduction. Our results suggest that APSs contribute to promoting the scale operation and environmental quality in agriculture.

Climate anomalies are affecting the world. How to reduce carbon emissions has become an important issue for governments and academics. Although previous researchers have discussed the factors of carbon emission reduction from environmental regulation, economic development, and industrial structure, limited studies have explored the carbon emission reduction effect of a city’s spatial structure. Based on 108 Chinese cities from the Yangtze River Economic Belt between 2003 and 2017, this paper examines the impact of the city cluster policy on city carbon emissions using the difference-in-differences (DID) method. We find that: (1) The city cluster policy has significantly reduced the cities’ carbon emissions by 7.4%. Furthermore, after a series of robust and endogenous tests, such as parallel trend and PSM-DID, the core conclusion still remains. (2) We further identify possible economic channels through this effect, and find that city cluster policy would increase city productivity, city technological innovation, and industrial structure optimization. The conclusions of this paper have important practical significance for China to achieve carbon neutrality and facilitate future deep decarbonization.

The “Two Control Zones” (TCZ) policy is the first air pollution regulation policy in China. We aim to examine the impact of the TCZ policy on green technological progress applying a difference–in–differences (DID) approach, using a city–level panel data set from 1990 to 2016. We show that the TCZ policy effectively increases the number of green patents of the cities in the two control zones. In particular, the TCZ policy has a significantly positive effect on the quantity and structure of human capital, including the number of inventors of patents and green patents, and the percentage of population with a higher education level. Moreover, the effects are heterogeneous, that is, the TCZ policy has a greater impact on the number of green patents in the control zones, where there are better R&D bases and more foreign investments.