Factors on Spatial Heterogeneity of the Grain Production Capacity in the Major Grain Sales Area in Southeast China: Evidence from 530 Counties in Guangdong Province

Grain security is an essential issue for countries across the world. China has witnessed over the last decades not only a rapid growth in the volume of the grain production, but also a divergence in its geographical distributions. Existing studies on the influencing factors of grain production have overlooked thus spatial heterogeneity. This paper investigates the factors that cause the geographical heterogeneity in grain output levels in Guangdong province of China, in terms of land, labor and capital. To address the spatial attenuation effect of the influencing factors, we use the Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) on samples of different spatial ranges, which include a total of 530 southern counties from 2015 to 2017. The results show that (a) the effect of land endowment on grain output vary across the east and the west, and between coastal and inland areas; (b) the effect of labor endowment on grain output are inconsistent in the sign and magnitude of the estimates across counties; (c) the effect of agricultural capital on grain production shows heterogeneity spatially (across the east and the west) and economically (across developed and less developed regions). We then analyze the potential mechanism behind this spatial heterogeneity, as well as its policy implications.