Reducing fertilizer use is key to curbing agricultural pollution and ensuring food safety. Land transfer enables farmers to obtain a more appropriate production scale, but its effect on the intensity of fertilizer application is not theoretically certain. On one hand, farmers with more land may adopt more scientific production methods, thus reducing the use of chemical fertilizers. On the other hand, the short-term behavior of land grantees on transferred land may increase fertilizer use intensity. This paper attempts to theoretically elucidate the specific mechanisms by which land transfer affects the intensity of fertilizer application and to verify the relationship between the two using data from fixed rural observation sites across China from 2011–2014 with the fixed-effects model and the mediating effect model. This paper concludes that (1) land transfer significantly reduces the intensity of fertilizer use; (2) land transfer increases the land size and promotes the use of machinery by farmers, but only the increase in land size further reduces the intensity of fertilizer application; (3) the effect of land transfer on fertilizer application intensity is significant only for food crops and not for cash crops, and (4) the effect of land transfer on fertilizer application intensity is most pronounced in western China, where land fragmentation is the severest and insignificant in eastern China, where agricultural modernization is more advanced.
The New Rural Cooperative Medical System (NRCMS) is one of the essential systems for ensuring public health in rural China. This paper investigates the effect of farmers' participation in the NRCMS on their subjective well-being and its mechanisms using data from the Chinese General Social Survey 2017. The results show that farmers' participation in the NRCMS significantly enhances their subjective well-being, and these results remain robust after regression with the instrumental variables method and propensity score matching method. Further analysis of the mechanisms suggests that participation in the NRCMS can enhance farmers' subjective well-being by increasing their consumption levels other than medical consumption. Moreover, medical consumption levels play a negative role in participating in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being, which can be explained as the “masking effect.” The regression results of the subsamples show that the higher a farmer's income is, the less his or her participation in the NRCMS enhances subjective well-being. And the effect of participation in the NRCMS on farmers' subjective well-being is not significant if their health status is too high or too low.
Haze has been a severe problem in China for some time, jeopardizing air quality, public health and sustainable growth. This paper examines the direct effect and spatial spillover effect of policy uncertainty on haze pollution with a spatial panel model, using prefecture-level data from 2004 to 2016. This study shows that: (1) policy uncertainty has increased the level of local haze pollution and has a significant spatial spillover effect on surrounding areas; (2) although local policy uncertainty has increased the haze pollution in geographically adjacent cities, it only affects the cities within the province with similar economic distances; and (3) the policy at the central level can effectively alleviate the impact of policy uncertainty at the local level on haze pollution, especially in relation to the spatial spillover effect, but still has limitations in eliminating the direct effect, which is due to the ineradicable nature of policy uncertainty.
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