Time, Spatial and Component Characteristics of Agricultural Carbon Emissions of China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The topic is interesting, but the title is not quite clear.
- In this study, the authors investigated the ACE effect on economic growth in China ( 31 provinces). The panel regression model with pooled OLS and FE estimators is conducted in the analysis. The paper has some contributions, but this manuscript has many flaws and concerns.
- In the abstract, the authors should clearly explain the abbreviations at the beginning. For example, pooled OLS and FE should be pooled ordinary least squares(OLS) and Fixed effects(FE). Also, I would suggest the authors improve the findings provided in the abstract. Do the authors find the inverted “U” shape in this analysis? What is the optimal level of agriculture GDP? It will help the readers to impress your results.
- In the introduction is too short. I suggest combining sections introduction and literature review together
- The citation in the text remains the problem. The year should be removed. For example, Holka et al. (2022) [13] should be Holka et al. [13]
- The results are well written; however, I suggest the authors calculate the turning points of the inverted U-shaped relationship between growth and ACE. i.e
Turning points= Exp(-BetaACE/2(BetaACE2)
- The conclusion and suggestions should be discussed more and clarify
- In lines 240 and 354, the authors mention the Random effects, but it is never used in this analysis. Please delete it.
- I also suggest comparing the performance of FE and OLS before the interpretation
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors analysed sources of the agricultural carbon emission (ACE) in different provinces of China. Basing on the literature they have chosen and examined the influence on ACE of 5 sources: carbon emissions of the agricultural machinery, carbon emissions of the production and use of agricultural plastic film, carbon emissions of the production and use of pesticide, carbon emissions from irrigation, and carbon emissions of the production and use of fertilizers.
They have explored the effect of the ACE on economic growth, with the use of econometric models such as the pooled OLS and FE they successfully examined the inverted “U” shape effect of ACE on both of the agricultural GDP and GDP under the control of other variables.
Generally I wonder why the animal breeding as the source of ACE was not included. Moreover in some places indicated below the explanations of results are rather not convincing. Some sentences should be corrected or rephrased because of English incorrectness which makes them difficult to understand.
Specific remarks:
Lines 218-219: the sentence seems not finished
Line 221: do you test empirically or do you perform an empirical test (English correction is needed)
Lines 228-229: a verb is missing in the first part of the sentence
Line 292: what do you mean by ‘the growth rates of the middle and western regions are quite closed’?
Lines 307-310: what kind of biological fertilizer do you have in mind?
Line 310: the last part of the sentence should be corrected.
Is the use of chemical fertilizers very high in China comparing to other Asian countries?
Lines 314-316: Why the wind is responsible for the ACE of PF of the middle region? It is not so obvious and requires explanation.
Line 350: in order to make it more unhealthy? This piece of advice is difficult to understand.
Line 374: Do you mean - higher?
Lines 372-374: What is closed? The sentence is to rephrase to make it more understandable
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors provided an acceptable revision. However, there are several doubts and problems that remain in this revision.
First, I still do not agree with keeping the short introduction, as I mentioned before the introduction should state the gap between the research, novelty, and importance of this research. Some important background of carbon emissions in China should be discussed. At this stage, it is still not acceptable.
Second, section 3.2 is not very clear. In Eq(1), the summation of 5 classifications of ACE id ACE. I do not agree here, it is no mathematic sense.
Also, regarding the notations of CEs in Eqs (2-6), I guess that it should be ACE. NOT CE. Another issue is the carbon emission coefficient, as I understand, different data set and ranges will result in different values of carbon emission coefficients. So, how do the authors ensure that these coefficients are suitable for this study? Why not the authors compute these values by yourselves? It will be the paper become reliable.
Third, the authors discussed the RE in this study and also reported the Hausman test. I suggest the authors show the results of RE estimation in Table 4 and also report the adjusted R-squared ( Not that lnSIZE is omitted in the results, thus, R-squared is not valid in comparing the model with different degrees of freedom). I also want to see the Hausman test results in this paper as well.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
