The Impact of Rural Population Aging on Farmers’ Cleaner Production Behavior: Evidence from Five Provinces of the North China Plain

Jing Liu, Shichun Du and Zetian Fu
Additional contact information
Jing Liu: School of Business, Ludong University, Yantai 264025, China
Shichun Du: School of Public Administration, Shandong Technology and Business University, Yantai 264005, China
Zetian Fu: Yantai Research Institute, China Agricultural University, Yantai 264670, China

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 21, 1-16

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to examine the impact of rural population aging on farmers’ cleaner production behavior through the intervening effects of three aspects (learning capacity, factor substitution and behavior imitation). The data used in this article were collected from a questionnaire survey of 916 farmers in the main grain producing provinces of the North China Plain. First, confirmatory factor analysis was carried out, and then data were analyzed through structural equation modeling using the bootstrap methodology in AMOS 24. The findings indicate that rural population aging inhibits farmers’ cleaner production behavior through learning capacity. In contrast, rural population aging promotes farmers’ cleaner production behavior through factor substitution and behavior imitation. From the perspective of both challenges and opportunities, this article investigates the impact mechanism and comprehensive effect of rural population aging on farmers’ cleaner production behavior, so as to explore new ways to promote cleaner agricultural production under the background of an accelerated aging the of rural labor force and provide reference for the formulation of relevant policies.

Keywords: rural population aging; cleaner agricultural production; learning capacity; factor substitution; behavior imitation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/12199/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/21/12199/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:21:p:12199-:d:672626

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().