Dynamic impact of negative public sentiment on agricultural product prices during COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significantly negative impact on public sentiment, which has resulted in panic and some irrational buying behavior, which in turn has had a complex impact on agricultural product prices. This study quantified online negative sentiment using micro-blog text mining and a time-varying parameter vector autoregressive model (TVP-VAR) to empirically analyze the dynamic impact of negative public emotions on agricultural product prices during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. It was found that the online negative sentiment impacted agricultural products prices during COVID-19 and had significant time-varying, lag, and life cycle characteristics, with the responses being most significant in the spread and recession periods. Differences were found in the price responses for different agricultural products and in different risk areas. The online negative sentiment was found to have the greatest impact on vegetable prices, with livestock products and vegetable prices being mainly positively impacted, fruit prices being mainly negatively impacted, and aquatic product prices being negatively impacted in the early stage and positively impacted in the middle and late stages. The online negative sentiment had the greatest impact on medium-risk area agricultural product prices, followed by low-risk areas, with the lowest impact found on the high-risk area agricultural product prices. Three policy suggestions for epidemic monitoring, public opinion guidance and control, and the timely release of agricultural product information are given based on the results.