Shocks in agricultural productivity and CO2 emissions: new environmental challenges for China in the green economy

The primary motive behind this research is to see the role of China’s large agriculture sector in promoting or demoting CO2 emissions. Therefore, we applied linear and non-linear ARDL models by collecting data over the period 1971–2019 for China. The results of the linear model suggest that livestock production can help to reduce CO2 emissions both in the short and long run. In the non-linear model, the short-run estimates of livestock production are insignificant, however, in the long run, the positive shock in the livestock production helps to reduce the CO2 emissions and the negative shock is insignificant. On the other side, an increase in crop production deteriorates the environmental quality in the short run in both linear and non-linear models. In long run, the estimate of crop production in the linear model is insignificant and in the non-linear model, the estimated coefficients of both positive and negative shocks in crop production are negative implying that a positive shock reduces the CO2 emissions while the negative shock increases the CO2 emissions.