Picking agriculture is a form of leisure agriculture based on the concept of traditional garden. Due to their unique layout and construction style, picking gardens have different attractive elements, including sightseeing, leisure, entertainment, crop production, and crop picking. However, despite its increasing importance, there is no systematic research on price elasticity or price substitution elasticity of production factors in picking gardens. To fill this gap, we surveyed 308 farmers in five districts of Beijing and employed a translog cost function to compare the impact of operation patterns on peach and cherry production cost by estimating elasticities of substitution between and among inputs. We found that own-price elasticity of all input factors was negative, while substitution relationships existed between labor and land, labor and fertilizer, fertilizer and manure, and manure and pesticide. This indicates that Beijing’s agricultural sector is labor intensive, while fertilizer and pesticide are scarcely used.

In this paper, we study the effects of international trade on forest conservation and welfare in a two-country model with industry-biased policymakers and Cournot-competing firms. We find that opening up to trade increases the harvest taxes that the industry-biased governments impose compared to the autarky taxes. The tax increase is large enough to decrease the production levels, which leads to higher conservation levels. In addition, the numerical simulation predicts that increasing the industry-bias monotonically increases (i) the positive tax effect, (ii) the positive conservation effect, and (iii) the welfare gains from trade. The intuition behind the results is that industry-biased governments already degrade the environment under autarky, so even a highly-distorted trade outcome can be welfare-improving. We conclude that, even if industry bias decreases conservation, it does not have to increase the environmental costs of trade.