Modeling Climate Feedbacks to Energy Demand: The Case of China

Abstract in HTML and technical report in PDF available on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change website (http://mit.edu/globalchange/www/).This paper is an empirical investigation of the effects of climate on the use of electricity by consumers and producers in urban and rural areas within China. It takes advantage of an unusual combination of temporal and regional data sets in order to estimate temperature, as well as price and income elasticities of electricity demand. The estimated positive temperature/electric power feedback implies a continually increasing use of energy to produce electric power which, in China, is primarily based on coal. In the absence of countervailing measures, this will contribute to increased emissions, increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, and increases in greenhouse warming.This study received funding from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, which is supported by a consortium of government, industry and foundation sponsors

Outlook for Asian Dairy Markets: The Role of Demographics, Income, and Prices,

The paper first presents a 10-year outlook for major Asian dairy markets (China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam) based on a world dairy model. Then, using Heien and Wessellsï¾’s technique, dairy product consumption growth is decomposed into contributions generated by income growth, population growth, price change, and urbanization and these contributions are quantified. Using the world dairy model, the paper also analyzes the impacts of alternative assumptions of higher income levels and technology development in Asia on Asian dairy consumptions and world dairy prices. The outlook projects that Asian dairy consumption will continue to grow strongly in the next decade. The consumption decomposition suggests that the growth would be mostly driven by income and population growth and, as a result, would raise world dairy prices. The simulation results show that technology improvement in Asian countries would dampen world dairy prices and meanwhile boost domestic dairy consumption.

Migrants and firms : evidence from China

This paper estimates the causal effect of rural-urban migration on urban production in China. We use longitudinal data on manufacturing firms between 2001 and 2006 and exploit exogenous variation in rural-urban migration due to agricultural price shocks. Following a migrant inflow, labor costs decline and employment expands. Labor productivity decreases sharply and remains low in the medium run. A quantitative framework suggests that destinations become too labor-abundant and migration mostly benefits lowproductivity firms within locations. As migrants select into high-productivity destinations, migration however strongly contributes to the equalization of factor productivity across locations

Integrated Model Development for the Assessment of Food Security in China Related to Climate Change and Adaptation

This thesis developed a practical methodological framework, which integrated the bio-physical and socio-economic processes within the food system across different scales. The framework provides a useful tool for the assessment of food security and possible adaptation related to climate change. It was applied in China, a country with rapid economic growth and a large population, in order to evaluate multiple dimensions of food security related to climate change and socio-economic development in the future. In the framework, an improved bio-physical crop model was coupled with an improved food economic model by scaling up from the farm level to the national level. The bio-physical crop model was developed from the site-based Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) model in order to investigate the impacts of climate change on physical production of a crop only related to environmental factors. The food economic model was developed from a partial equilibrium economic model, China's Agricultural Policy Simulation Model (CAPSiM). This was done in order to simulate the response of a socio-economic system to the negative consequences on a food economic system from the bio-physical change in crop production due to climate change. Case studies of China and the Jilin province were investigated by applying the framework. The impacts of climate change on yield and phenology of maize under multiple greenhouse gas emission scenarios were studied at provincial and national levels in three time periods, 2020s, 2050s, 2070s, using the improved bio-physical crop model. In general, maize yield reduction due to climate change ranges from -3% in 2020 to -14% in 2070. The worst yield is -20.5% in 2070 produced under the A1FI scenario. Food security for China until 2050 was projected under multiple climate change and socio-economic scenarios by using the food economic model, and analyzed with respect to food availability, food price and the system resilience to sudden disasters. Modelled climate change impacts on food availability in this study are minimal, producing only a 23 Mt (~8%) gap between supply and demand for maize by 2050. The socio-economic system will compensate for the impacts of climate change on the self-sufficiency of grains by about 8% of total production for the whole country. The impacts on single grain would cause the prices of other grains to rise in future. The effectiveness of potential adaptation measures was assessed quantitatively at both farm and national levels. Uncertainties among different scenarios are discussed for China and the Jilin province

ABSTRACTS OF SELECTED PAPERS

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

An Empirical Research of Consumer Behavior in Urban China

麗澤大学平成27年

The Impact of Diversified Income and Agricultural Tax Reform on the Consumption of Chinese Rural Residents

Income from different sources has become an important guarantee to sustain family life and normal expenses in China. How different sources of income affect farmers’ expenditure levels and how they have influenced farmers’ consumption since the agricultural tax reform in China since the 20th century has become a question worth exploring. Panel data from 2016 to 2020 are utilized to examine rural residents’ consumption expenditures and their sources of disposable income by region to analyze the impact of different income sources on farmers’ consumption and the correlation between income before and after agricultural tax reform, and finally conducts an analysis of future scenarios based on a time series model. The research results show that the elasticity of income from different sources on rural households’ per capita consumption expenditure is different, among which wage income is the most elastic, while household business income has a relatively small effect on consumption expenditure, but through data analysis we can find that agricultural tax reform has a significant and continuous promotion effect on rural households’ per capita consumption expenditure. The continuous cycle of agricultural tax reform is long, and the transmission chain through less tax payment, expanded reproduction, harvest, realization, and then consumption is long, thus there is a certain lag in tax reduction effect. Income from such sources in the first three years has a large impact on the current period data, while the first four and five years have a relatively small impact on current business income

Estimating the non-commercial-commercial feed gap in China and its impact on future world demand for soybeans

Two effects simultaneously shape the future soybean meal (SBM) demand in China: the income effect on meat consumption and the transition effect on feed usage in animal production. The income effect has been studied intensively by previous researchers, and more animal products are believed to be consumed. The transition effect, however, has yet received enough attention. This study shows that transition effect is more important in determining China???s future derived demand for SBM than income effect. Future soybean demand in China is predicted based on both effects till 2030