Carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth: Evidence from the agricultural sector of China's main grain-producing areas

China is currently the world's largest carbon emitter. As a large agricultural country, understanding the relationship between carbon emissions, economic growth and energy consumption in the agricultural sector can contribute to achieving the sustainable development of agriculture. Hence, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth in the agricultural sector using a time series of data from China's main grain-producing areas during the period between 1996 and 2015. We first estimate the agricultural carbon emissions. And then based on the estimated results, we employ the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model, the Granger causality test based on the vector error correction model (VECM), and impulse response and variance decomposition to test the relationship between carbon emissions, energy consumption and economic growth in the agricultural sector. The estimated results support the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for agricultural carbon emissions in China's main grain-producing areas. Furthermore, agricultural energy consumption has both the short-run and the long-run negative impacts on agricultural carbon emissions. In addition, we find that there is a bidirectional causality between agricultural carbon emissions and agricultural economic growth in both the short-run and the long-run, and the unidirectional causalities are found to exist from agricultural energy consumption to agricultural carbon emissions and agricultural economic growth. Finally, several policy recommendations are offered to promote the sustainable development of agriculture in China's main grain-producing areas.