Research On The Comprehensive Competitiveness Of China’s Agricultural Listed Firms Based On DEA

Agricultural firms are key participants in the market economy to foster national economic development,and the performance evaluation of agricultural firms has great importance in China.Agricultural firms’ performance evaluation in a competitive market through efficiency,total factor productivity(TFP),and comprehensive competitiveness are great concerns for agricultural development authorities.This particular study will expand the research ideas of competitiveness,improve the research method and techniques to evaluate the performance,and further strengthen the management strategy.Enormous literature exists on DEA efficiency,TFP,and firm competitiveness models.Through extensive literature review,we found that these models still have four shortcomings which are defined as follows: first,in the DEA efficiency model,there is less literature focused on the non-radial super-efficiency model,especially these can handle the data with negative values.And there is not a one-stage non-radial super-efficiency DEA model aiming at negative data in existing literature.Second,in the TFP model,Luenberger index development is relatively poor,and the literature does not explain the intuitive significance of the distance function.Third,the existing literature only evaluate the performance of firms from a single dimension,and a comprehensive quantitative model lacks which could explain the overall performance evaluation.Further,there is not any literature highlighting the characteristics of agricultural listed firms through index selection,and benchmarking management perspective of agricultural firms is ignored by previous researchers.This particular study constructs ISBSM and SBLI models to gauge the efficiency and TFP.Further,based on this development,we construct a comprehensive performance evaluation model to evaluate agricultural firms’ performance from three different dimensions of scale,TFP and efficiency.Moreover,by extending the above models to interval fields,the performance of firms during the whole period can be estimated.This thesis is arranged as follows:Chapter one is the introduction part of the thesis,which includes the overview of research ideas and existing literature on DEA efficiency models,TFP models,and agricultural firms’ performance.Further,it elaborates the shortcomings of existing models and put-up the new innovative research ideas.Chapter Two comprises related concepts and theoretical bases.By defining the related concepts,this chapter clearly defines the research objectives and introduces the relevant theoretical bases,which construct the foundation for the following chapters of the thesis.Chapter Three includes the variables and data selection for performance evaluation of listed agricultural firms.Data for the performance evaluation is selected according to the research requirements,and descriptive statistics are applied to analyze the selected indicators.Chapter Four is the efficiency estimation.This chapter constructs the new ISBSM model and gauges Chinese listed agricultural firms’ efficiency for a specific period.Results specify the efficiency change over the period and different sub-industry of agricultural firms.Results also analyze the source of efficiency growth in each firm.Further,the efficiency of sampled agricultural firms is evaluated using interval ISBSM.Moreover,this chapter compares the ranking results obtained through different input-output values.Chapter Five is the evaluation of TFP.This chapter constructs the new SBLI model to estimate the TFP change in Chinese agricultural firms for a specific period.The main innovation of the SBLI model is that technological change can be further subdivided into and indicators to reveal the DMU’s switch between different planes.The results are further elaborated to analyze the TFP change in different years and sub-industries.This chapter also distinguishes the main causes of TFP change for each agricultural firm.Moreover,interval TFP is obtained from the interval SBLI model,and ranking results obtained through different input-output values are compared.Chapter Six is the comprehensive performance evaluation.A comprehensive performance evaluation model is constructed by considering the scale,TFP and efficiency simultaneously,and this particular model can reveal the shortcomings more effectively.Furthermore,the whole year’s performance is evaluated by using the interval model,and the meaning behind the distribution is given.Chapter Seven summarizes the research results and the innovation of this study.Further limitations of the research and future work direction are given.The main innovations of this paper are as follows:(1)Efficiency model and TFP model.The ISBSM model takes the negative data into consideration.And on the basis of decomposing the TFP index evaluated by SBLI into efficiency change and technology change,this study further subdivides the technology change into and indicators,which can be used to reveal the change of the plane.Then,the interval ISBSM model and SBLI model are constructed to measure the interval efficiency and the interval TFP,and the ranking results obtained from different input-output values are compared.(2)Comprehensive performance evaluation model analyses the firms’ performance in all aspects,and it overcomes the flaws of single dimension evaluation.This study puts forward clear paths for firms’ strategic improvement.Moreover,the interval comprehensive competitiveness model is also used to estimate the whole year’s performance.(3)Productive biological assets are used as input elements to show the characteristics of agricultural enterprises,and market value is used as an output index to highlight the characteristics of listed enterprises.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)Efficiency conclusion.The average efficiency score of all agricultural firms for the period(2010-2019)is 0.93,which means that there is still 8.7%inefficiency in operations.The causes of inefficiency are different each year.Government policy adjustments,domestic and foreign financial market fluctuations,economic situation,and industry structural changes have a certain impact on agricultural firms’ efficiency.The efficiency changes trend of each sub-industry is inconsistent in the sample year.On average,efficiency scores of forestry,service industry,planting industry,fishery,and animal husbandry decrease in turn.In 2019,twelve firms are efficient and twenty-six are inefficient.The interval efficiency results show that in 2019,six firms are strong efficient,six firms are weak efficient,and the rest are inefficient.Moreover,the selection of input-output values can impact the efficiency scores,and employing interval data can estimate the whole year’s efficiency.(2)TFP conclusion.The average TFP(2010-2019)of Chinese listed agricultural firms is progressive.Further decomposing the TFP results indicates that the main reason for TFP’s progress is technological change.It is also found that the technological progress during the study period is promoted by and ,and the average level of the whole industry is switching in the positive plane.Elaborating the sub-industry results,we found that the average TFP of planting industry,animal husbandry,fishery,and service industry is improved due to technology progress unilaterally,and only forestry’s TFP declines for the sample period. and indicators reflect that the average level of any sub-industry is switching in the positive plane.Results indicate that in 2019,thirty-one firms improve TFP while the remaining seven show a declining trend in TFP.At the firm level,efficiency change has a more significant impact on TFP change.Further,the selection of input-output values can impact the TFP ranking,and using interval data as the input-output value can reflect the TFP performance during the whole year.(3)Comprehensive competitiveness conclusion.In 2019,there are three Star,three Problem,four Self-Sufficient in the sample firms.The results of interval comprehensive competitiveness show that in 2019,both bound of twenty-two firms are located in the same Octant,while sixteen firms are located across the Octants.Both results of the comprehensive competitiveness model and its interval extent show that when the firms have mastered technology and management concept,they can develop into large-scale firms.