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Despite China’s fast-growing e-commerce and its great achievement in promoting poverty alleviation through consumption, little is known about Chinese consumers’ online ethical consumption. Using the payment card elicitation method, this paper designs a within-subject survey and a between-subject survey to investigate Chinese consumers’ quality perception and preference for apples from poverty-stricken areas. The results show that before “information shock”, emphasizing that taste and safety attributes of apples from poverty-stricken areas are the same as the conventional ones, Chinese consumers on average are willing to pay a 31% premium for apples from poverty-stricken areas. After “information shock”, both the within-subject and between-subject designs show a minimal drop of the premium, implying that the ethical attribute is the main motivation for buying apples from poverty-stricken areas. The regression results show that quality perception of private attributes has significant effect on consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for apples from poverty-stricken areas, and trust in government supervision of e-commerce plays an essential role in motivating online ethical consumption.

This article analyses the technical and environmental efficiency of hog production in China using data from the China Agricultural Product Cost-Benefit Compilation (NDRC 2005–2013) and the First National Census of Pollution: Manual of Discharge Coefficient of Livestock and Poultry Industry (IEDA and NIES 2009). The empirical results show a great variation in environmental efficiency, ranging from 0.344 to 0.973 with a mean value of 0.672 that declines over time. Southwest China is found to be the most environmentally efficient region, while the Northeast and the Northwest are the least efficient. Another finding is that technical and environmental efficiencies are highly correlated in hog production; the most environmentally efficient regions are usually found to have high technical efficiency, and vice versa. In addition, we computed the output elasticities with respect to each factor input. The results show that feed is the most efficient input, with an output elasticity of approximately 0.551, which is much higher than the elasticity of the nitrogen surplus, other capital or labour. The output elasticity with respect to the nitrogen surplus is 0.287 on average. Finally, the scale elasticity in hog production is slightly higher than 1.