The Agricultural Economic Value of Weather Forecasting in China

Abstract

Agriculture is one of the areas most sensitive to climate change. Extreme climate events can directly affect agricultural production and development. Based on the data from the statistical yearbooks of 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2019 and the survey data of meteorological forecasting, this paper uses the fixed-effect model to empirically test the impact of meteorological forecasting on agricultural economic value. The results show that meteorological forecasting has a significant promoting effect on agricultural economic value, in that an increase in the accuracy of the meteorological forecast by one percentage point will increase agricultural economic value by 0.500 percentage points, and the results still hold after a series of robustness tests. Further study showed that there were some regional differences in the agricultural economic value of the meteorological forecasting, and the meteorological forecasting had the strongest promoting effect on the agricultural economic value of the western region, followed by the eastern region and the central region.