Study On Producers' Decision-making And Consumer Behavior Of Carbon Labeled Food

Global warming has become a worldwide environmental problem, and a global agreement has been reached in the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, where greenhouse gas emission reduction becomes the common responsibility of countries around the world. At present, China ranks first in the world carbon dioxide emissions. Due to the difficulty of changing the industrial structure with high input, high energy and high emissions in the short term, China is facing the double pressure of economic development and environmental protection. Meanwhile, as a trading power, our export occupies an important position in economic development. Under the global low-carbon background, all countries have developed a strict carbon emission standard on imported goods, which will severely restrict China's export trade. Twelve countries and regions such as the UK, Japan, France, the United States, Sweden, Canada and South Korea, have enacted carbon emission regulations aiming to implement carbon labeling system indicating and constraining the product life cycle carbon emissions. The implementation of carbon label will not only increase the export cost, resulting in decline in international competitiveness, and once widely used in international commodities, it will become a new technical barriers to trade following the other environment-friendly labels such as eco-labels and energy efficiency labels.In that way, how to deal with the impact of carbon label, what factors drive manufacturers to use carbon label, and how the consumers'attitude and willingness to pay for carbon labels, all above is the core subject in this paper. Using carbon label food as an example, this paper constructs a decision-making behavior model of producers'carbon-labeling food production, and investigates the major influencing factors of producers'decision-making behavior in carbon-labeling food production by applying Structural Equation Modeling under Bootstrap resampling, and takes Luzhou Laojiao Company as a case to verify the accuracy of the conclusions. Contingent Valuation Method is used to study consumers'willingness to pay and payment levels for carbon labels, with Binary Logistic Model and Censored Regression Model, Profound analysis of the major influencing factors of consumers'willingness to pay and payment levels is made. This paper takes 87 food processing companies and 218 consumers as the sample, and the main conclusions are as follows.(1)China food production enterprises show clear willingness to certify low-carbon product and use carbon label, but lower willingness to bear the cost increase. Carbon-labeling food production and energy saving are facing the main issues including higher input costs and low benefits, lack of incentives, technology and equipment, professional personnel and funds.(2)The major influencing factors of producers'decision-making behavior include personal characteristics, Subjective Norm (SN), and past behavior of the producer, there is also an obvious interaction between the personal characteristics and Perceived Behavior Control (PBC), SN and PBC. This paper preliminarily verifies the relative applicability of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to the study of producers'decision-making behavior in carbon-labeling food production.(3)The consumers in China have grossly low awareness of carbon label, and there is significant gap with developed countries. Even most of management and technical staff with college education and high income in enterprise show a lower awareness of carbon label.(4)The major influencing factors of consumers'willingness to pay include carbon label attitude, acceptance, age, income and registered permanent residence. Specially, those who are highly educated, high earners, aged 26-49 years and living in urban, have positive attitude and high acceptance, and show a clear willingness to pay for carbon-labeling food. Income level is the crucial factor influencing consumers'expenditure standard for additional price of carbon-labeling food, and the experience of shopping for food has a certain negative impact on the expenditure standard.