Low-carbon city pilot policy, carbon emission reduction effect of agricultural inputs, and transmission pathways: evidence from a quasi-natural experiment at the prefecture level in China based on multi-period DID

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:多期間DIDとCS-DIDを組み合わせた政策効果の因果推論設計と、農業由来排出の伝達経路分析の実証例として参考になる。

🏢実務担当者:農業サプライチェーンに関わる企業が、地域の低炭素政策が投入財コストや排出プロファイルに与える影響を把握する材料になる。

🏛政策担当者:地域別・行政レベル別に異なる低炭素政策の効果を踏まえ、差別化された農業脱炭素政策の設計に活用できる。

Introduction Low-carbon city pilot policies constitute an important institutional practice for advancing the green and low-carbon transition of agriculture and achieving the “Dual-Carbon” goals. Scientific assessment of the agricultural emission-reduction effects of this policy is critical for land and food security. Methods Based on prefecture-level panel data of China spanning 2005–2024, this paper adopts a multi-period staggered Difference-in-Differences (DID) model to systematically examine the impacts of low-carbon city pilot policies on carbon emissions associated with agricultural inputs, and provides associational evidence on the transmission mechanisms. Given that the conventional two-way fixed-effect multi-period DID may yield potential bias under strong heterogeneity, this study further employs the Callaway-Sant’Anna staggered DID (CS-DID) to estimate the dynamic treatment effects for different cohorts. Multiple robustness strategies including PSM and placebo tests are also applied to validate regression results and improve the credibility of causal inference. Results The study finds that low-carbon city pilot policies significantly reduce regional Agricultural input-related carbon emissions mainly through three pathways: optimizing agricultural factor allocation, forcing the low-carbon transformation of agricultural industrial structure, and improving agricultural energy-use efficiency. Heterogeneity exists in policy effects: western cities achieve the strongest emission-reduction outcomes, provincial-capital cities show substantially stronger carbon-mitigation effects than ordinary prefecture-level cities (significant only at the 10% level in the heterogeneity test), and cities included in the pilot program at an earlier stage deliver greater carbon-reduction efforts for agriculture. Discussion This paper effectively identifies the net agricultural emission reduction effect of the progressive low-carbon policy, supplements empirical evidence on the governance of agricultural non-point source carbon emissions by low-carbon policies, and provides empirical support and decision-making references by region and city administrative level for the national low-carbon transformation of agriculture and the optimization and implementation of differentiated low-carbon policies.

• openalex https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2026.1987131first seen 2026-11-12 04:57:46 · last seen 2026-11-14 05:03:54