Factors affecting CO2 emissions in China's agriculture sector: Evidence from geographically weighted regression model

China is currently the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Considered as a large agricultural country, carbon emission in China's agriculture sector keeps on growing rapidly. It is, therefore, of great importance to investigate the driving forces of carbon dioxide emissions in this sector. The traditional regression estimation can only get average and global parameter estimates; it excludes the local parameter estimates which vary across space in some spatial systems. Geographically weighted regression embeds the latitude and longitude of the sample data into the regression parameters, and uses the local weighted least squares method to estimate the parameters point-by-point. To reveal the nonstationary spatial effects of driving forces, geographically weighted regression model is employed in this paper. The results show that economic growth is positively correlated with emissions, with the impact in the western region being less than that in the central and eastern regions. Urbanization is positively related to emissions but produces opposite effects pattern. Energy intensity is also correlated with emissions, with a decreasing trend from the eastern region to the central and western regions. Therefore, policymakers should take full account of the spatial nonstationarity of driving forces in designing emission reduction policies.