ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Food Syst.
Sec. Agricultural and Food Economics
Volume 9 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2025.1644196
Geographical Indication Certification of Agricultural Products and Agricultural Carbon Emissions --Empirical Evidence from China Author Information
Provisionally accepted
Yu Zhang
Yanping Liu*- Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing, China
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Based on a systematic review of the theoretical framework through which agri-food geographical indication (GIAP) systems promote agricultural carbon emission reduction, this study empirically investigates their impact using provincial panel data from China spanning 2004 to 2022 and employs a difference-in-differences (DID) model. The results indicate that the implementation of GIAP systems has a significant positive effect on reducing agricultural carbon emissions, each additional GIAP certification reduces ACE intensity by 0.3679 units on average. The conclusion that remains robust across a variety of specification tests. Mechanism analysis demonstrates that GIAP effectively lower agricultural carbon emissions primarily by facilitating farmland transfer, strengthening agricultural socialized services, increasing the proportion of grain crops, and improving technical efficiency. Furthermore, the empirical findings reveal significant spatial spillover effects associated with GIAP. Additional heterogeneity analysis shows that the carbon emission reduction effects of GIAP vary substantially across different regions, economic zones, functional areas, and "hot" and "cold" spatial clusters. Based on these findings, it is recommended that greater emphasis be placed on the development and refinement of the GIAP system, and that regionally differentiated strategies be adopted to further integrate GIAP policy with agricultural carbon reduction initiatives, thereby laying a solid institutional foundation for the green and low-carbon transformation of agriculture.
Keywords: Agricultural carbon emissions, geographical indications, Difference-in-differences, Green Agriculture, Spatial spillover
Received: 12 Jun 2025; Accepted: 31 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang and Liu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Yanping Liu, Jiangsu Open University, Nanjing, China
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