Does the Food Safety Risk Kuznets Curve Exist?

——Evidence from the Provincial Food Safety Incidents Reported on the Internet

YIN Shi-jiu1，WANG Jing-bin1 and WU Lin-hai2

（1.Research Center for Food Safety and Agriculture Green Development ，Qufu Normal University，Rizhao 276826，Shandong， China；2.Institute for Food Safety Risk Management，Jiangnan University，Wuxi 214135，Jiangsu，China）

Abstract：Evidence data shows that there is some certain regularity relation between food safety risk and economic growth. The Kuznets hypothesis of food safety risk and spatial correlation hypothesis is proposed based on the source and formation mechanism of food safety risk. The authors use network data mining tools to collect inter- provincial panel data of food safety incidents reported by mainstream Internet medias from 2005 to 2019 and use the Spatial Dubin Model to carry out the empirical test. It is found that，first，the turning point is roughly located around 15，172 yuan per capita GDP taking the year 2005 as the base year；at present，most provinces in China have surpassed the“turning point”；and the number of food safety incidents has begun to decline. Second，there is a spatial correlation between food safety incidents in neighboring provinces ；the urbanization levels and the output values of the food industry above scale in neighboring regions have negative impact on the number of incidents in certain province；and the agricultural output value in neighboring regions will have a significant positive effect on this. We should fully understand the close relation between the current situation of food safety in China and the current stage of economic development，pay more attention to food safety，accelerate the modernization of governing system and our capacity for governing，and do our best to surpass the“turning point”of food safety risk in advance. Besides，there is the spatial spillover effect in food safety，which demonstrates the importance of food safety related inter- regional cooperation ；local governments should formulate the inter-regional cooperative governing mechanism taking the inter-regional flow of processed-food risk along the supply chain and the accumulation of agricultural-food risk as the focus ，perfect the traceability system for food，and promote coordination in food safety risk governing.

Key words：food safety risk；economic growth；Kuznets hypothesis；spatial Durbin model