Table 4.

Estimated impacts of the Grassland Ecological Compensation Program (GECP) on livestock production: county level.

	(1)	(2)
Dependent variable	Log (year-end cattle inventory)	Log (year-end sheep inventory)
P × T	−0.027	−0.121**
	(0.602)	(0.019)
Number of observations	3,992	4,000
R2	0.810	0.800

Note. This table provides the results from the difference-in-differences (DID) approach for the estimated impacts of the GECP on livestock production using county-level data (Eq. (1)). NDVI stands for the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, which is a measure for grassland quality. It was constructed based on infrared and near-infrared channel remote sensing images and has been widely used as an indicator of vegetation coverage. The treatment group (P = 1) includes the counties in five North and Northwestern program provinces that were covered in GECP-I (i.e., the first five-year period of GECP), i.e., Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. The control group (P = 0) includes the counties in five North and Northeastern provinces that were not covered by GECP-I (i.e., the first five-year period of GECP) until 2016, i.e., Shanxi, Hebei, Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang. The pre-program period (T = 0) is 2008–2010. The post-program period (T = 1) is 2011–2013. Year and province fixed effects are controlled for. Climate controls include monthly rainfall, temperature, and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI) for May to October in each year. Socioeconomic control includes per-capita county fiscal income. Robust standard errors are clustered at the county level. A two-sided t test is performed for each coefficient. The exact p-values are in parentheses.

**p < 0.05.