Asset Specificity,Demand Driven,and Pesticide Safety Application Behavior

Socialism with Chinese characteristics into a new era,the main contradiction in our country’s society has been transformed into the contradiction between the people’s increasingly good life needs and the unbalanced and inadequate development.There are frequent problems about the safety of agricultural products,putting forward the requirements about optimizing the variety structure,quality structure,regional structure and market structure.Agricultural product safety problem is caused by unreasonable application of pesticide residues,its negative externalities performance risk to human health,food security and ecological environment destruction.At present,pesticide was used about 300 thousand tons,unit applying pesticide intensity was 2.5 times that of the international average,Sichuan was 13.65 kg/ha,and use efficiency is low.Control the producer is the primary task of ensuring the safety of agricultural products,and quality safety assurance is turned from post-mortem to source control.However,because of its property of public goods,externality and information asymmetry,and the production process is complicated.These reasons are easy to cause market failure and government failure,and appear a "lemon market" or the adverse selection behavior,that this has severely reduce the farmers’ income and consumer welfare level.Therefore,the control of pesticide safety requires internal self-control and external government and market restriction,so as to regulate pesticide safety application behavior.Based on the asset specificity theory,farmer behavior theory,information asymmetry theory,transaction cost theory and the demand level theory as the theoretical basis,this paper builds a theoretical framework that asset specificity,demand driven and pesticide safety application behavior,the safe application of pesticides is divided into two dimensions that hard constraints and soft constraints.And based on the survey data of Sichuan province and official statistics,this paper uses the Probit,zero poisson regression and OLS method,does the research as the following three aspects.Firstly,based on the mechanism of action what asset specificity to the pesticide safety application behavior,the influence results are analyzed empirically,and makes a discussion from the perspective of information asymmetry,also based on IV-Probit model,discussing the endogeneity problem.Secondly,based on the mechanism of action what demand driven to the pesticide safety application behavior,the influence results that to pesticide safety application behavior and no pollution certification are analyzed empirically.Finally,according to the demand driven regulation effect of pesticide safety,this paper analyzes the effect of the interaction between the asset specificity and the demand drive on pesticide safety application behavior.Conclusions are as follows:(1)The overall level of pesticide safety application was not high,and there were differences among different crops and regions.The current use of prohibited pesticides mainly occurs in vegetable crops;the cognition degree of pesticide safety interval is generally higher,and fruit is the highest,vegetable is the lowest;the majority of farmers will still apply the standard dose,among which grain is higher than fruits and vegetables;the average number of doses was 3.078,with most vegetables.Pollution-free certification can effectively reveal the safety signal,solve the problem of information asymmetry.Pollution-free certification of agricultural products in Sichuan there are scale effect,structure effect,ripple effect,accumulative effect and demonstration effect,etc.(2)Asset specificity has different effects on safe pesticide application behavior in different dimensions,while information asymmetry can affect the investment and allocation of farmers’ asset specificity,and it may also occur opportunistic behavior and adverse selection risk.Material asset specificity possess strong "lock-in",there exits inhibitory effect between material asset specificity to prohibited pesticides and number of pesticides,and there exits positive effect between material asset specificity to pesticide safety interval and standard dose;there has negative correlation between growing experience to prohibited pesticides,and negative correlation between technical training to prohibited pesticides and number of pesticides,positive correlation to pesticide safety interval and standard dose;there has positive effect between education to pesticide safety interval,and there exists substitution effect between the amount of labor and standard dose,but the health status would positively affect the use of prohibited pesticides;the land area and land fragmentation have an uncertain effect on the safety of pesticides under hard and soft constraints.(3)Government regulation and public brand effect can effectively inhibit the use of prohibited pesticides,and promote in pesticide safety interval.Under the hard constraint,the government regulation is effective,but under the soft constraint,not effective;the public brand effect brings the brand premium and the monopoly revenue,and implicitly restrains the farmers to take the safe application behavior.(4)The demand driven can promote farmers to regulate pesticide safety to a certain extent,and Chengdu is more restrictive than prefecture-level city.The market demand capacity and the distance to the prefecture-level city have negative influence on the use of prohibited pesticides;the market demand capacity,consumption ability and the distance to the prefecture-level city have a positive impact on pesticide safety interval;the demand capacity and the distance to Chengdu have a positive effect on the standard dose;the market demand capacity has negative influence on the number of pesticides,and the economic distance is significantly positive.(5)There are agglomeration effect and ripple effect in the Certification of pollution-free agricultural products in Sichuan,and the demand driven can promote the scale and sales growth of no-pollution certification.In geographical distance,the certification mainly focuses on the area within 400 kilometers of Chengdu.In economic distance,the certification is mainly concentrated in the area of 50,000 yuan per person.(6)The interaction between demand driven and asset specificity is different in the direction and significance of pesticide safety application.And demand driven strengthen the negative impact that asset specificity effects on the prohibited pesticide and number of pesticides,and also strengthen the positive impact that asset specificity effects on pesticide safety interval and standard dose.The result shows that asset specificity,demand driven and government regulation can effectively promote the pesticide safety application,form agricultural products safety production system that the production subject control,market demand pushing back,the government control assistance.Based on the above findings,the following policy implications are proposed: reasonable configuration of asset specificity and the suppression of opportunism;improving information acquisition ability and reducing transaction cost;enhancing publicity and testing of safe pesticides application and promoting the diffusion of technology;improving the price incentive mechanism and promoting standardization production;strengthening market information disclosure and solving information asymmetry;optimizing the "industry-space" match and reducing the space cost;implementing tight trading mode and ensuring the stability of contract;establishing the dynamic regulation strategy of the four-dimensional matrix "organization-government-market-society".The innovation are as follows.Firstly,from the perspective of farmers,this paper reclassifies and defines the specificity of farmers’ asset specificity,and analyzes the effect of asset specificity on pesticide safety application based on theory and empirical analysis,and further discussion from the perspective of information asymmetry.Given farmers of bounded rationality and heterogeneity,its specificity investment in asset specificity and configuration will affect the pesticide safety application,asset specificity can be divided into material asset specificity,the technology asset specificity,human capital asset specificity,relationship asset specificity,cooperation organization asset specificity,geographic asset specificity.Secondly,from theoretical and empirical studies have found that asset specificity and demand driven are conducive to the pesticide safety application behavior at some extentunder under hard constraints and soft constraints.And based on the "farmers-organization-government-market" logical framework,this paper discusses comprehensively the connotation of the pesticide safety application behavior,will point(farmers)combined with surface(market)to explore.Thirdly,asset specificity and demand driven have a positive effect on the pesticide safety application.Demand driven is "fortifier" that farmers adjust dynamically safety behavior and reduce the management risk according to the asset specificity,as a kind of external governance mechanism,can effectively solve the market failure and government failure,play a supervision,restraint and incentive effect,enable farmers to form security production process that "information-price conduction-expected form-production decision".