How Does China’s Economic Policy Uncertainty Affect the Sustainability of Its Net Grain Imports?

Dynamic Impacts of External Uncertainties on the Stability of the Food Supply Chain: Evidence from China

The food supply chain operates in a complex and dynamic external environment, and the external uncertainties from natural and socio-economic environment pose great challenges to the development of the food industry. In particular, the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia-Ukraine conflict have further exacerbated the vulnerability of the global food supply chain. Analyzing the dynamic impacts of external uncertainties on the stability of food supply chain is central to guaranteeing the sustainable security of food supply. Based on the division of food supply chain and the classification of external uncertainties, the TVP-FAVAR-SV model was constructed to explore the dynamic impacts of external uncertainties on food supply chain. It was found that the impacts of external uncertainty elements were significantly different, the combination of different external uncertainty elements aggravated or reduced the risks of food supply chain. And some uncertainty elements had both positive and negative impacts in the whole sample period, as the magnitude and direction of the impacts of various uncertainties in different periods had time-varying characteristics.

Does economic policy uncertainty undermine stability of agricultural imports? Evidence from China

China is the world’s largest importer of agricultural products. Stability of agricultural imports directly affects domestic food availability, and hence influences national food security. This study is important to gauge effects of uncertainty resulting from global and domestic economic policy changes on the stability component of food security in China. Though many studies have explored the determinants and consequences of Chinese agricultural trade, research focusing on stability of agricultural imports is lacking. To fill the gap, this study calculates duration length and survival probability of China’s agri-food imports, and estimates effects of economic policy uncertainty (EPU) on the stability. Results show that trade duration of the agri-food imports is 12.07 months in China. However, 51.69% of disrupted trade relationships would resume after 2 months and 92.68% of temporarily interrupted trade relationships return to the market after 12 months. Empirical estimations show that global EPU has a larger impact on the stability of agricultural imports than Chinese EPU. Although Chinese EPU has heterogeneous effects on imports of different agri-food products in China, global EPU does not. Stabilized domestic food price and improved domestic agricultural productivity would improve stability of the imports significantly. The study concludes that China’s agricultural imports are less dynamic than previous studies claimed. However, EPU significantly erodes the trade stability. To offset negative effects of EPU on the stability, government should pay more attention on stabilizing domestic food price volatility and increasing food productivity, and therefore improve food security in China.

Locating the Principal Sectors for Carbon Emission Reduction on the Global Supply Chains by the Methods of Complex Network and Susceptible–Infective Model

How to locate the reasonable targets for carbon emission reduction in the complex global supply chain remains a big challenge for policy makers. This paper proposed a novel framework for finding more accurate carbon emission reduction targets, combining multi-regional input-output analysis, complex network approach and an improved susceptible–infective model called the influence spreading model. The results showed that the global embodied carbon emission flow network had the characteristic of being significantly scale-free, and there were a few important industrial sectors in the network with different capabilities, including strength-out, closeness-out, betweenness and clustering coefficient. The simulation results of the influence spreading process showed that the effective infection thresholds were relatively low, which were between 0 and 0.005 due to the significant scale-free characteristic of the global embodied carbon emission flow network. With the change of the infection thresholds, the proportion of the infected sectors significantly decreased from about 0.95 to 0.10 on average, and spread time also decreased from about three rounds to about eight rounds. In the aspects of the spreading scope and spreading speed, the industrial sectors with high closeness-out and betweenness had better performance than the ones with high strength-out. This indicated that the spreading capabilities of industrial sectors which exported significant carbon emissions, such as petroleum, chemicals and non-metallic mineral products in China, were commonly weaker than industrial sectors which occupied the most important positions in the entire supply chain, such as transport equipment in Germany. Hence, the industrial sectors with high global spreading capability and media capability were important for global carbon emission reduction. Such information suggested that the policies for carbon emission reduction should be made based on a global perspective of the supply chain system. This work proved that the policies for carbon emission reduction should be based on a global perspective of supply chain system.