Price, internet penetration and green food industry development: Based on the interaction between demand and supply

Yongqiang Zhang; Pengju Wan; Guifang Ma; Paola Andrea Pereira Uñate

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0289843

Price, internet penetration and green food industry development: Based on the interaction between demand and supply

PLoS One. 2023 Sep 8;18(9):e0289843. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0289843. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Yongqiang Zhang¹, Pengju Wan², Guifang Ma¹, Paola Andrea Pereira Uñate¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Economics and Management, Northeast Agricultural University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China.
² School of Automotive and Mechatronics Engineering, Harbin Cambridge University, Harbin, Heilongjiang, China.

Abstract

The development of the green food industry can not only meet people's demand for high-quality food and promote the sustainable development of the ecological environment but also carry the additional expectation of realizing rural revitalization. Based on the data of Heilongjiang province from 2000-2021, we examined the dynamic effects of price fluctuations and Internet penetration on the green food industry using a system dynamics model. The empirical results showed that both price fluctuations and Internet penetration affect people's demand for green food, which in turn affects the development of the green food industry. The inhibitory effect of price fluctuation on green food industry is more obvious in the early stage of green food industry development, and Internet penetration always significantly promotes the development of green food industry. Moreover, the Internet penetration can effectively mitigate the negative impact of price fluctuation on the green food industry, and the impact becomes more significant with the increase of Internet penetration. The results of this study can help promote the sustainable development of the green food industry.

Copyright: © 2023 Zhang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Environment*
Food
Food Industry*
Food Quality
Humans
Internet

Grants and funding

This paper is financially supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China [grant numbers (20BJY149)] and the Heilongjiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Science Planning Project [grant numbers (18JYH757)]. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.