Data-driven analysis and evaluation of regional agriculture for high-quality development of Anhui Province in the Yangtze River Delta

Can E-commerce development policies promote the high-quality development of agriculture?-A quasi-natural experiment based on a China's E-commerce demonstration city

As a new business model, E-commerce brings new changes to the global economy and society. So, can E-commerce development policies promote high-quality agricultural development? This article regards the pilot construction of national e-commerce demonstration cities as a quasi-natural experiment for the development of e-commerce. Based on the E-commerce pilot and economic and social development data of national prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2018, the agricultural total factor productivity calculated by the Fare-Primont index method is used as the characterization of the quality of urban agricultural development, and an empirical model is constructed under the progressive Differences-in-Differences framework. This paper empirically tests the overall impact of E-commerce development on the high-quality development of agriculture and its sources, analyzes the heterogeneity and dynamics of the impact, and investigates the possible impact mechanism. The result shows that from the overall impact and its sources, the development of E-commerce in cities has a positive impact on the high-quality development of agriculture, and the impact is mainly due to its role in promoting technological innovation and economies of scale. From the perspective of heterogeneity, the larger the population size of a city, the more significant the level of e-conomic development or Internet development. From the perspective of the dynamic impact, the positive impact of e-commerce development becomes more significant over time. With the passage of time, the impact of E-commerce on high-quality agricultural development policies shows a trend of first increasing and then decreasing. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence for the rationality and effectiveness of policies and measures related to E-commerce to promote the high-quality development of agriculture.

Data-driven evaluation framework for the effectiveness of rural vitalization in China: an empirical case study of Hubei Province

Rural vitalization (RV) has attracted more and more attention in China, especially since the Rural Vitalization Strategy (RVS) was proposed to restrict rural decline in 2017. The evaluation of RV is an effective means to objectively identify the characteristics and problems of rural development, so exploring scientific and rational evaluation methods is important for sustainable rural development. Therefore, this study builds a data-driven evaluation framework from a "bottom-up" perspective, and selects Hubei Province as the object to evaluate the effectiveness of RV. The evaluation index system is formed based on the concept and connotation of RV, which contains six dimensions, namely thriving businesses (TB), pleasant living environments (PLE), social etiquette and civility (SEC), effective governance (EG), living in prosperity (LP), and organization system (OS). The empirical results indicate that there is a low level of variation of the total scores but an obvious disparity in the dimensional scores in 13 prefecture-level and 83 county-level regions. At county-level, the regional development stage has an impact on the effectiveness of RV, and regions with a higher economy or endowed with better resources perform better. The results of spatial analysis further reveal that there is regional agglomeration as well as differences in various dimensions, and regions with characteristic industries or policy support perform better. Compared with the traditional evaluation method, differentiated evaluation objectives and diversified data are considered in the evaluation process of this study. The results and discussion shown in this study could provide empirical evidence for policymakers to effectively promote RV in the future.

Data-Driven Evaluation of the Synergetic Development of Regional Carbon Emissions in the Yangtze River Delta

Evaluating the degree of coordination among regional carbon emission systems is key to achieving an earlier carbon peak and carbon neutrality. However, quantifying the co-evolution of carbon emissions among regions is challenging. Therefore, we propose a data-driven method for evaluating the synergetic development of the regional carbon emission composite system. First, the proposed method employs relevant data to calculate the carbon emissions and carbon emission intensity of each subsystem within the region to describe the temporal trends. The inverse entropy weight method is then used to assign weight to each order parameter of the subsystem for data processing. Then, we perform synergetic development assessment of the composite system to measure the order degree of each subsystem, the degree of synergy among subsystems, and the overall synergetic degree of the temporal evolution of carbon emissions between regions. Finally, the evaluation results can be used to suggest measures for the regional coordinated reduction of carbon emissions. In this study, we used data from the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) region from 2010 to 2019 to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the method. The results show that there is still a long way to go to reduce carbon emissions in the Yangtze River Delta region. Economic development still relies heavily on fossil energy consumption, and the regional carbon emission reduction synergy is not high. This study provides theoretical and methodological support for regional carbon emission reduction. Moreover, the proposed method can be applied to other regions to explore low-carbon and sustainable development options.