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Does Expressway Consume More Land of the Agricultural Production Base of Shandong Province?

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Abstract

The effect of expressways on cultivated land is ambiguous. Many studies conclude that building and upgrading expressways increases pressure on cultivated land while others find expressways reduce the rate of cultivated land loss. In this paper, we use satellite remote sensing images of cultivated land in Shandong province of China to test whether the existence of expressway in 2005 affected the level of cultivated land in 2010 and the rate of change from 2005 to 2010. To account for expressway access for each of our 1 \(\hbox {km}^2\) (‘pixel’) units of cultivated land we measure whether or not and what type of roads penetrate the ‘watershed’ in which the pixel lies. These watersheds allow more plausible measures of accessibility than those traditional ‘crowfly’ distance measures that ignore topography. To account for possible confounding we also use 24 additional covariates. Although simple univariate OLS regressions analysis show that cultivated land is always lower while cultivated land increasing rates are higher either when there is an expressway, these results are not robust. Controlling for all of the covariates and also using recently developed covariate matching techniques to estimate treatment effects, we find that expressway can most safely be described as putting a positive impact on cultivated land changes.

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Fig. 1

Data source: World Development Indicators from World Bank (from 1990 to 2010)

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Notes

  1. To avoid over-controlling, we do not include in the \(Z_{i}\) matrix of equation. The variable, distance to nearest road, measures the distance from each grid cell to the nearest road of any type. We generated the variable, road density within the watershed by measuring “the length of all roads per square kilometer (\(\hbox {m}/\hbox {km}^{2}\)).

  2. The Moran I statistic is 0.73 for the dependent variable and 0.49 for the residuals. Intuitively, this statistic is equivalent to the slope coefficient of a linear regression of the weighted average value of cultivated cover (residuals) for the pixels surrounding the ith pixel on the cultivated cover (residual) in pixel i.

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Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the China National Natural Science Funds for Distinguished Young Scholar (Grant No. 71225005), the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 71533004) and the National Natural Science Foundation of International/Regional Cooperation and Exchange Programs (Grant No. 71561137002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xiangzheng Deng

  2. Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101, China

    Xiangzheng Deng & Siqi Jia

  3. Department of Economics, The University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand

    Xiangzheng Deng & John Gibson

  4. Faculty of Social Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sha Tin, 100053, NT, Hong Kong

    Siqi Jia

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  1. Xiangzheng Deng
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Correspondence to Xiangzheng Deng.

Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 6.

Fig. 6
figure 6

Distribution of cities overlaid with a road network buffered with a radius of 3 km (a), 5 km (b), 7 km (c) and 10 km (d)

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Deng, X., Gibson, J. & Jia, S. Does Expressway Consume More Land of the Agricultural Production Base of Shandong Province?. Comput Econ 52, 1293–1316 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10614-017-9747-8

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