Using a decomposition method, this paper proposes an analytical framework to investigate the mechanisms by which agricultural support policies affect farmers’ use of fertilizers in agriculture in China. The mechanisms are decomposed into “three effects” (structural, scale, and technological effects). It is found that China’s agricultural support polices have significantly contributed to the increased use of agricultural fertilizers through encouraging farmers to bring more land under cultivation (the scale effect). Meanwhile, some policies have also helped reduce fertilizer consumption when farmers were motivated to increase the area of grains crops (the structural effect). The role of technological progress in affecting fertilizer consumption (the technological effect) appears to be minimal and uncertain. Compared to direct subsidies, indirect subsidies play a much greater role in affecting farmers’ production decision making and are more environmentally consequential. This paper argues that some of China’s agricultural support policies are not well aligned with one key objective of the country’s rural policies—improving environmental sustainability. It is recommended that the government takes measures to reform agricultural support policies and to reconcile agricultural and rural policies in order to achieve sustainable rural development.

Some scholars have already proved the important role of agglomeration in studying how environmental regulation (ER) affects the location of polluting firms. However, further research is needed on both the mechanism and the empirical evidence. This paper reports the construction of a location database of new chemical plants in China’s Yangtze River Economic Belt (YREB), where a fixed-effects panel threshold regression model was used to explore the agglomeration threshold of effective ER. We found a single agglomeration threshold for the whole YREB region that represented the turning point of ER from excluding to attracting new chemical enterprises. Additionally, there were two agglomeration thresholds in the lower reaches. If agglomeration reached the lower threshold, the effect of ER changed from repulsion to nonsignificant attraction. Once above the upper threshold, the attraction effect became large and significant. The results for this region were consistent with the Porter hypothesis. Furthermore, there was a single agglomeration threshold in the middle reaches. When agglomeration level exceeded the threshold, the repellant effect of ER was no longer significant. In the upper reaches, we found no valid threshold and ER always exhibited a small and nonsignificant exclusion effect. The pollution haven hypothesis was more explanatory in the middle and upper reaches. In the end, some suggestions are provided to support the government to formulate differentiated environmental policies.

Pollution-intensive industries (PIIs) have both scale effect and environmental sensitivity. Therefore, this paper studies how environmental regulation (ER) affects the location dynamics of PIIs under the agglomeration effect. Our results show that, ER can increase the production costs of pollution-intensive firms (PIFs) by internalizing the negative impact of pollutant discharge in a region, and thus, directly reduces the region’s attractiveness to PIFs. Meanwhile, ER can indirectly reduce the attractiveness of a region to PIFs by reducing the externality of the regional agglomeration effect. Moreover, these influences are regulated by the level of local economic development. Based on the moderated mediating effect model, we find evidence from the site selection activities of newly built chemical firms in cities across China. The empirical test shows that compared with 2014, the proportion of the direct effect of ER to the total effects significantly decreased in 2018, while the proportion of indirect effects under the agglomeration effect increased significantly. Our findings provide reference for the government to design effective environmental policies to guide the location choice of new PIFs.

China is going to vigorously develop a new type of agricultural business that is characterized by large-scale planting, and its farmland transfer market is expected to shift from a “buyer’s market” to a “seller’s market”. In the literature, the optimal scale of farmland management is mainly discussed from the perspective of farmland lessees. The development of a healthy farmland transfer market should also consider the needs of farmland lessors. In this paper, we construct a farmland transfer supply function from the perspective of farmers, based on the theory of land market pricing, and apply it to assess the price–volume relationship using surveyed farmland transfer data on wheat farmers in Henan Province, China. The major findings of the present study are as follows: (i) farmers can optimize the allocation of production factors through the farmland transfer market to maximize their profits, and (ii) the quantity of farmland transferred to the market is significantly positively correlated with the price of farmland transferred, demonstrating a power function relation. Currently, the average price of farmland transferred in China’s main grain-producing areas exceeds CNY 800 per mu. There is a difference between the actual quantity of farmland transferred and the supply function estimated in this paper, indicating that the market is currently in a crucial period of vigorously promoting farmland transfer. We suggest that government departments follow the laws of farmland transfer, refer to the farmland transfer supply function, and implement policies that support and benefit grain production to provide rapid and consistent guidance to the farmland transfer market.