Does Online Public Opinion Regarding Swine Epidemic Diseases Influence Fluctuations in Pork Prices?—An Analysis Based on TVP-VAR and LDA Models

In modern society with a highly developed Internet, online public opinions on swine epidemic diseases have become one of the important influencing factors for the fluctuation of pork prices. In this paper, the Baidu AI large model, Time-Varying Parameter-Stochastic Volatility-Vector Auto Regression (TVP-VAR) and Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) approaches are employed to investigate the dynamic impact of online public opinion regarding live swine epidemic diseases on fluctuations in pork price. The results show that: (1) Online public attention and negative sentiment exert significant time-varying impacts on pork price fluctuations, with these impacts being most pronounced in the short term and gradually diminishing over the medium and long term. (2) During the outbreaks of swine epidemic diseases, the impulse impact of online public attention and negative sentiment on pork price fluctuations exhibits distinct stage-specific characteristics. Initially, the impact is negative and subsequently turns positive before eventually waning. (3) The online discourse surrounding swine epidemic diseases can be categorized into four topics including disease transmission, vaccine technology, industry development, and disease prevention and control. Online public attention towards these four topics associated with negative sentiments generally contributes to variations in pork prices. Based on findings, several policy recommendations are proposed, including the timely release of swine epidemic disease information, the establishment and enhancement of the online public opinion monitoring and early warning system, as well as adherence to routine prevention and control of pig epidemic diseases.