PONE-D-21-31548The regulatory effect of breeding pig herd structure on pig production under the environmental regulationPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhanbota,

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PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: To my opinion, your topic is principally interesting and important for the scientific community and eyond.

As I am not a native speaker, I cannot judge the linguistic English quality of the manuscript in every detail. However, I think there is some room for improvement, e.g. in line 142 ff. Another example: in line 170/171, I would write “…believe that they have…” instead of a repetition of “environmental regulations and village regulations and folk conventions”.

Since I am primarily concerned with other methods (life cycle assessment and sustainability analyses), I cannot give a well-informed opinion on the methodological novelty of the study. The calculations and the statistical seem correct.

Your manuscript does not follow the classical structure proposed by scientific journals such as (alos) PLOS One (with Introduction, Material & Methods, Results, Discussion,…). I do not know if this is obligat

Regarding the abstract:

Line 8 (and other places!): Why do you address pollution control only regarding breeding? I know that your modeling focusses on breeding, but at least in European and North American pig production, the fattening phase is the most relevant point, accounting for about three-fourths of the impact over the life cycle (in terms of GHG emissions, among other impacts). Thus, I would rather write “pig production” (or “pig husbandry”?) instead of “breeding” in the Introduction schapter.

Line 19: It is difficult to interpret the two early warning values without the description of any unit.

Regarding Introduction:

The chapter well describes the Chinese situation (the application case), however, in comparison to other papers from my discipline, I would have expected some more references to peer reviewed literature and a description of, for instance, another country/continent or the global situation concerning price fluctuations, pests such as the African Swine Fever, etc. To my knowledge, the Chinese pork market is related to the markets of many other countries with specific mass and price fluctuations. Other countries have their own pollution control regulations – how are they interconnected and comparable with Chinese regulations? These aspects are not reflected in your manuscript! But they could be at least considered in a part of your Introduction section and taken up in the Discussion section.

Regarding Material and Method section:

The first part(s) of your rather long Material and Method section (“Literature review”) seems to me as a part of the Introduction. You wrote a research article, not a review paper.

In my opinion the Material and Methods section in a research article needs to describe all important aspects, which form the basis for your own modelling. To my opinion, the (narrower) Material and Method section should describe the used databases and key words regarding “Literature research” as well as data sources, models (formulas,...) and the variables that are used in the analysis. Your Material and Method section (“Literature review”) describes over long passages more the background of your work.

The chapter (sub-/heading) structure of the manuscript, especially regarding Material & Methods, and the size of some chapters seems somewhat disproportionate.

Line 106: You use the abbreviation “CPI” for one time only. Please write it in full words.

Line 123: The same with the abbreviation “DID”. Please write it in full words.

Furthermore, some abbreviations regarding statistical analysis (i.a. LCC, HP, IPS test) are not given with a full name by the first use.

I like the message from lines 176 to 189 and I think that this would also fit well at the end of the Introduction chapter. Then, before the actual chapter Material & Methods, formulate the hypotheses or research questions!

I miss a description of the early warning (score) in Material & Methods. This is a value that you have specifically calculated within your paper, isn’t it? Thus I would like a description of how you have used it.

The description of the Material & Methods chapter (“Theoretical Analysis”; from line 190 onwards) could probably be phrased more concisely (and more "scientifically"), especially from line 205 onwards. For instance, I would delete the sentence with “Although there is a saying that…” or radically shorten it!

Line 257-258: Please rephrase the title, e.g. “Pig production factors and environmental regulation” (Is that too much shortened? In any case, I wouldn't use a question-like sentence as a heading).

Generally, I miss a numbering of the headings in your manuscript in order to be able to clearly distinguish their levels.

Line 273, 306 and others: you did not define hypotheses (nor detailed research questions) in the Introduction section, but describe the hypotheses' achievement in the Material & Methods-section (what is not possible!).

For me, the first sentence in the Conclusions is one of those sentences that needs to be simplified. Such long and convoluted sentences occur sometimes throughout the document, but make your manuscript difficult to read.

Reviewer #2: Comments to the Author: 1. From the perspective of the pig industry, this article identifies the dynamic impact of environmental regulations on pig production in China, which has an academic value.

2. However, this article has some technical datils to improve. ①The variable which is utilized to measure breeding herd structure is a little simple. I do not think it can proxy the structure precisely. ②The control variables in sys-GMM are the price which contains 12 years, but this article did not adjust them with price index. It may lead to estimation bias. ③The variable lnASF is not shown in the variables descriptive statistics table. ④what is the meaning of three stars on t statistics value of variable lnASF in Regression 3 in Table 6？

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The regulatory effect of herd structure on pig production under the environmental regulation

PONE-D-21-31548R1

Dear Dr. Zhanbota,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Adnan Noor Shah, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No