IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/palcom/v12y2025i1d10.1057_s41599-025-04765-4.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Buddhist belief matter to pesticide application? Evidence from rice farmers in southern China

Author

Listed:
  • Houjian Li

    (Sichuan Agricultural University)

  • Andi Cao

    (Sichuan Agricultural University)

  • Han Zhang

    (Sichuan Agricultural University)

  • Lili Guo

    (Sichuan Agricultural University)

Abstract

Excessive pesticide use in agriculture poses significant environmental and health risks, making it crucial to understand the factors influencing farmers’ pesticide use. While previous research has examined individual, economic, social and political factors, the impact of religious beliefs, particularly Buddhism, remains underexplored. This study uses the control function approach to analyze survey data from 3410 rice farmers in China (2018–2019), assessing how Buddhist belief affects pesticide use. The results indicate that Buddhist farmers use fewer pesticides per hectare and incur lower pesticide costs compared to non-Buddhist farmers. Robustness checks confirm the reliability of the findings. The negative effect of Buddhist belief on pesticide use is more pronounced among farmers who have received rice cultivation training, have a high level of risk perception, and hold cooperative membership, while this effect is weaker for farmers with more farming experience. Furthermore, the influence of Buddhist belief varies with farmers’ propensity to believe in Buddhism. These findings highlight the potential of integrating cultural and religious dimensions into agricultural policies to promote rational and sustainable pesticide application.

Suggested Citation

  • Houjian Li & Andi Cao & Han Zhang & Lili Guo, 2025. "Does Buddhist belief matter to pesticide application? Evidence from rice farmers in southern China," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 12(1), pages 1-16, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:12:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-025-04765-4
    DOI: 10.1057/s41599-025-04765-4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-025-04765-4
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41599-025-04765-4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kit-Chun Lam & Guicheng Shi & Guicheng Shi, 2008. "Factors Affecting Ethical Attitudes in Mainland China and Hong Kong," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 77(4), pages 463-479, February.
    2. Alberto Bisin & Thierry Verdier, 2000. ""Beyond the Melting Pot": Cultural Transmission, Marriage, and the Evolution of Ethnic and Religious Traits," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 115(3), pages 955-988.
    3. Owen, Ann L. & Videras, Julio R., 2007. "Culture and public goods: The case of religion and the voluntary provision of environmental quality," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 162-180, September.
    4. Arthur Lewbel, 2012. "Using Heteroscedasticity to Identify and Estimate Mismeasured and Endogenous Regressor Models," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(1), pages 67-80.
    5. Martin Eckhoff Andresen, 2018. "Exploring marginal treatment effects: Flexible estimation using Stata," Stata Journal, StataCorp LLC, vol. 18(1), pages 118-158, March.
    6. Zihan Nie & Nico Heerink & Qin Tu & Shuqin Jin, 2018. "Does certified food production reduce agrochemical use in China?," China Agricultural Economic Review, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 10(3), pages 386-405, August.
    7. Di Falco, Salvatore & Perrings, Charles, 2005. "Crop biodiversity, risk management and the implications of agricultural assistance," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 55(4), pages 459-466, December.
    8. James J. Heckman & Edward Vytlacil, 2005. "Structural Equations, Treatment Effects, and Econometric Policy Evaluation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 73(3), pages 669-738, May.
    9. Lopes Soares, Wagner & Firpo de Souza Porto, Marcelo, 2009. "Estimating the social cost of pesticide use: An assessment from acute poisoning in Brazil," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(10), pages 2721-2728, August.
    10. Zihan Nie & Nico Heerink & Qin Tu & Shuqin Jin, 2018. "Does certified food production reduce agrochemical use in China?," China Agricultural Economic Review, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, vol. 10(3), pages 386-405, August.
    11. Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, 2015. "Control Function Methods in Applied Econometrics," Journal of Human Resources, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 50(2), pages 420-445.
    12. Rivers, Douglas & Vuong, Quang H., 1988. "Limited information estimators and exogeneity tests for simultaneous probit models," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 39(3), pages 347-366, November.
    13. Liu, Elaine M. & Huang, JiKun, 2013. "Risk preferences and pesticide use by cotton farmers in China," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C), pages 202-215.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Li, Jiajia & Li, Houjian, 2022. "Spiritual support or living support: Which alleviates solid fuel use for rural households in ethnical minority regions of China?," Renewable Energy, Elsevier, vol. 189(C), pages 479-491.
    2. Pallab Ghosh & Kevin Grier & Jaeho Kim, 2021. "Heterogeneous endogeneity," Statistical Papers, Springer, vol. 62(2), pages 847-886, April.
    3. Mogstad, Magne & Torgovitsky, Alexander, 2024. "Instrumental variables with unobserved heterogeneity in treatment effects," Handbook of Labor Economics,, Elsevier.
    4. Cai, Rong & Ma, Jie & Wang, shujuan & Cai, Shukai, 2024. "Can crop insurance help optimize farmers’ decisions on pesticides use? Evidence from family farms in East China," Journal of Asian Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C).
    5. Jie Dong & Kuan Zhang & Xiguo Yin & Houjian Li & Mansoor Ahmed Koondhar, 2021. "Does piped water improve adolescent health? Empirical evidence from rural China," Review of Development Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 25(3), pages 1601-1628, August.
    6. Charlotte Fabri & Sam Vermeulen & Steven Van Passel & Sergei Schaub, 2024. "Crop diversification and the effect of weather shocks on Italian farmers' income and income risk," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(3), pages 955-980, September.
    7. Caroline Krafft, 2020. "Why is fertility on the rise in Egypt? The role of women’s employment opportunities," Journal of Population Economics, Springer;European Society for Population Economics, vol. 33(4), pages 1173-1218, October.
    8. Doko Tchatoka, Firmin & Dufour, Jean-Marie, 2020. "Exogeneity tests, incomplete models, weak identification and non-Gaussian distributions: Invariance and finite-sample distributional theory," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 218(2), pages 390-418.
    9. Liverpool-Tasie, Saweda & Nuhu, Ahmed Salim & Awokuse, Titus O. & Jayne, Thomas S. & Muyanga, Milu & Aromolaran, Adebayo & Adelaja, Adesoji, 2020. "Spillover effects of Medium-Scale Farms on Smallholder Behavior and Welfare: Evidence from Nigeria," 2020 Annual Meeting, July 26-28, Kansas City, Missouri 304606, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association.
    10. Yuki Otsu, 2024. "Does visitation in prison reduce recidivism?," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 43(1), pages 126-156, January.
    11. Feng, Shuaizhang & Han, Yujie & Qiu, Huanguang, 2021. "Does crop insurance reduce pesticide usage? Evidence from China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 69(C).
    12. Hoshino Tadao & Yanagi Takahide, 2022. "Estimating marginal treatment effects under unobserved group heterogeneity," Journal of Causal Inference, De Gruyter, vol. 10(1), pages 197-216, January.
    13. Thomas E. Guerrero & C. Angelo Guevara & Elisabetta Cherchi & Juan de Dios Ortúzar, 2021. "Addressing endogeneity in strategic urban mode choice models," Transportation, Springer, vol. 48(4), pages 2081-2102, August.
    14. Tafti, Elena Ashtari, 2023. "Technology, Skills, and Performance: The Case of Robots in Surgery," CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) 78746, Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico.
    15. Huang, Lulu & Zhang, Yuan & Zuo, Congmin, 2023. "City size and the employment of female migrant workers in the service sector: Evidence from urban China," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 82(C).
    16. Cornelissen, Thomas & Dustmann, Christian & Raute, Anna & Schönberg, Uta, 2016. "From LATE to MTE: Alternative methods for the evaluation of policy interventions," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 41(C), pages 47-60.
    17. Opoku Adabor & Enock Kojo Ayesu, 2024. "Effect of ethnic diversity on child labor: Empirical evidence from Ghana," Sustainable Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(6), pages 7246-7261, December.
    18. Wilko Letterie & Øivind A. Nilsen, 2022. "Pricing Behaviour and Menu Costs in Multi‐product Firms," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 89(355), pages 746-769, July.
    19. Liu, Ziming & Yu, Lu, 2020. "Stay or Leave? The Role of Air Pollution in Urban Migration Choices," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 177(C).
    20. D’Haultfœuille, Xavier & Hoderlein, Stefan & Sasaki, Yuya, 2024. "Testing and relaxing the exclusion restriction in the control function approach," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 240(2).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palcom:v:12:y:2025:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-025-04765-4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.nature.com/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.