| dc.description.abstracteng | With the rapid economic growth, the dietary pattern has undergone great changes in China. The traditional dietary structure high in staple food and vegetables is evolving into Western food diet containing a lot of fat (Guo et al., 2000; Popkin et al., 2001; Tian and Yu, 2013; 2015; Huang et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017). Changes in dietary patterns have resulted in the co-existence of under-nutrition and over-nutrition and the prevalence of obesity and diabetes. These issues deserve more attention from policy makers. Actually, many factors could influence the changing diet in China, such as dietary knowledge, food accessibility and preference. One objective of this dissertation is to study the impacts of dietary knowledge, food accessibility and preference on diet quality. The findings may provide valuable implications for nutrition security in China. Additionally, consumers start to value sustainable food because of their increasing awareness of environmental protection or other reasons. Eliciting consumer preference for sustainable food such as organic food and meat alternatives is important to develop sales markets. Therefore, another objective of this dissertation is to explore consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for organic food and meat alternatives.
Concerning the research methodology, the first topic employs three-stage least square estimation models (3SLS) to explore how food accessibility and diversity of agricultural production affect real food consumption, the deviation of real food consumption from the China Food Pagoda (CFP) 2016, and diet quality among Chinese farmers. In the second topic, we estimate the impact of dietary knowledge on Chinese diet patterns by adopting the random effects model as the main strategy and employing pooled OLS model in robustness tests. Moreover, this topic employs the mediation test to empirically evaluate the mediated effect of dietary knowledge on the diet pattern. For the topic three and four, we use the payment card approach to elicit the WTP for organic food and meat alternatives, and then a generalized Tobit model is employed to estimate interval regression models to capture the factors of WTP for sustainable food. In order to check for the robustness of the results, a simple OLS is used as an alternative method for these two topics.
Generally, we observe that food accessibility and dietary knowledge have effects on the diet pattern. In chapter two, we confirm that food accessibility contributes to improvements in diet quality for Chinese farmers, especially for those not engaged in agricultural production. Living close to local food markets reduces farmers’ cost of accessing more diversified food, which could increase the consumption of food not produced at home, decrease the overconsumed own produced food, and finally lead to a higher level of diet quality. Families not engaged in agricultural activity do not produce food, so their food consumption is highly dependent on food accessibility; therefore, food accessibility has a significantly strong influence on their diet quality. For chapter three, our findings suggest that dietary knowledge can significantly improve Chinese adults’ diet quality and this impact is mediated by unhealthy food preference. Moreover, increasing availability of unhealthy food could weaken the influence of dietary knowledge on diet quality.
Additionally, the fourth chapter’ results show that political party support could affect the consumers’ WTP for organic food in Germany. Consumers supporting the Green Party in comparison with other consumers have a lower WTP for organic vegetables after controlling other socioeconomic factors, since they wish organic food should not be a privilege for individuals but inclusive to the general public.
For chapter five, we suggest that consumer perception has a significantly effect on the WTP for meat alternatives. Specifically, environmental awareness only has a positive impact on the WTP for plant-based meat, while the satisfaction with food safety and the degree of liking gym positively influence the WTP for both plant-based and cultured meat. Additionally, risk preference, trust, positive and negative reciprocity could also have vital roles in the Chinese consumers’ WTP for meat alternatives. First, residents with more preference for risk would like to pay more for meat alternatives. Then, the preference for trust could reduce the consumers’ WTP for plant-based meat. Moreover, positive reciprocity has a significantly positive effect on the WTP for plant-based meat, while negative reciprocity significantly and negatively influences the WTP for cultured meat. Lastly, the public is just willing to pay lower price for meat alternatives than traditional meat.
These findings can provide general policy implications. First, promoting dietary knowledge (e.g., popularizing the Chinese Food Pagoda 2016 to the general public) is still an effective way to improve Chinese diet quality. In addition, creating a fair and sustainable food environment is an innovative and effective solution. Second, the policy to promote organic food should offer farmers more subsidies to offset their high production costs. Third, policy interventions should lay stress on advertising the environmental-friendly attribute of meat alternatives, and it is beneficial for producers to target consumers with a high level of risk preference or more reciprocity. Last but not the least, it is necessary to make reasonable prices for both plant-based and cultured meat. | de |