| Realizing green and low-carbon agricultural production is of great significance to building China into an agricultural power.Due to extensive production modes,weak environmental protection facilities,and regulatory difficulties in the process of agricultural economic development,unscientific farming methods and excessive use of chemical agricultural materials have brought some agricultural ecological environmental problems such as air pollution,water pollution and soil pollution.As agricultural production is bound to be accompanied by the emergence of agricultural undesirable output,how to effectively improve agricultural ecological efficiency is an important issue at present and in the future,while taking into account agricultural development and protecting agricultural ecological environment.The public goods attribute of agricultural ecological environment determines the improvement of agricultural ecological efficiency and the protection of rural ecological environment cannot only rely on the conscious adjustment of farmers,but requires the intervention of external forces.At the same time,the social embeddedness of farmers determines that their behavior is affected by the rural primary governance system composed of government and public institutions,market-oriented organizations and informal organizations.As the direct actor of rural ecological environment and agricultural ecological efficiency,farmers’ production decisions are affected by the knowledge provided by external organizations.The distance of knowledge is the key to whether knowledge can be adopted by farmers.Therefore,under the dual realistic background that the problem of rural ecological environment is still prominent and the actual power of farmers to improve the ecological environment is insufficient,analyzing the behavior of farmers from the perspective of organizational support and knowledge distance and exploring the internal logic of improving agricultural ecological efficiency will not only help to improve the agricultural ecological environment under the premise of ensuring food security,but also have important reference value to give full play to the role of various organizations in strengthening the construction of rural primary organizations and supporting the agricultural environment.On the basis of existing research,we analyze and empirically test the effect of organizational support on agricultural ecological efficiency through knowledge distance by using the farmer behavior theory,information and behavior decision-making theory,public goods and externality theory,organizational support theory and mathematical model,and by using actual survey data and OLS,2SLS,Tobit,quantile regression,2SRI and PSM methods.The core research content can be summarized into three parts:The first part is theoretical analysis.First of all,we analyze the underlying logic that determines agricultural ecological efficiency from the general decision mechanism of efficiency,and analyze the organizational support mechanism of agricultural ecological efficiency based on the theory of public goods and externalities.Then,we analyze the impact of organizational support on knowledge distance and the impact of knowledge distance on agricultural ecological efficiency based on the theory of organizational support,farmer behavior theory,information and behavior decision-making theory.Finally,a theoretical analysis framework is established to analyze the impact of organizational support on agricultural ecological efficiency through knowledge distance.The second part is characteristic fact.Firstly,we introduce the design of survey plan and the collation of survey data.Secondly,we carry out descriptive statistical analysis on the samples from three levels of individual characteristics,family endowment and village characteristics.Finally,we measure and describe the core variables such as organizational support,knowledge distance and agricultural ecological efficiency.The third part is empirical test.Firstly,the quantile regression model is used to analyze the impact of organizational support on agricultural ecological efficiency,and IV-2SRI,PSM and other methods are used to conduct endogenous test and robustness analysis,and scale heterogeneity,regional heterogeneity and the interaction of different dimensions of organizational support are further analyzed.Secondly,the OLS model is used to analyze the impact of organizational support on knowledge distance,and IV-2SLS,robust regression based on M estimation and other methods are used to conduct endogenous test and robustness analysis,and the scale heterogeneity,regional heterogeneity and the role differences of different types of organizational entities are further analyzed.Thirdly,Tobit model is used to analyze the impact of knowledge distance on agricultural ecological efficiency,and IV-Tobit,one-step method and other methods are used to conduct endogenous test and robustness analysis,and the scale heterogeneity,regional heterogeneity and the interaction of different dimensions of knowledge distance are further analyzed.Finally,we use Baron and Kenny’s step method for mediation analysis to explore the mediating mechanism of knowledge distance on organizational support affecting agricultural ecological efficiency.The main findings of this paper include five aspects:First,the overall level of agricultural ecological efficiency of farmers is relatively high with a certain degree of business scale heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity,and the degree of dispersion is small,while some individual farmers are very low.Farmers receive the most support from informal organizations,followed by market-oriented organizations,governments and public institutions.Organizational support shows a certain degree of scale heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity.The distribution of cognitive distance,space-time distance and relationship distance is relatively concentrated and scale heterogeneity is relatively obvious,while the distribution of content distance is relatively scattered and has obvious scale heterogeneity and regional heterogeneity.Second,enhancing organizational support can effectively improve agricultural ecological efficiency.The increase of the scale of organizational support and the enhancement of the degree of organizational support can improve the agricultural ecological efficiency.Among them,the communication duration between farmer and organization has the greatest impact on the agricultural ecological efficiency,followed by the frequency of communication,organization type,and organization number.That is,the impact of the degree of organizational support on the agricultural ecological efficiency is greater than the scale of organizational support.The type of organizational support and the number of organizations have a stronger impact on large-scale farmers,while communication frequency has a stronger effect on smallscale farmers.The effect of communication duration is more obvious in small-scale farmers before the 50 th percentile,and more obvious in large-scale farmers after the 50 th percentile.The influence of organization type on agricultural ecological efficiency is relatively weak in the southern region.The effect of organization number is more obvious in the samples from the central and northern regions before the 50 th percentile,and more obvious in the samples from the southern regions after the 75 th percentile.The effect of communication frequency remains stable in the samples from the central and northern regions,and gradually declines and slows down in the samples from the southern regions.The impact of communication duration on agricultural ecological efficiency remains stable but relatively weak in the southern region,and shows a gradual decline and slow trend in the samples from the central and northern regions.There is a synergistic effect between organization type,organization number,communication frequency and communication duration,and the enhancement of one dimension can enhance the promotion of other dimensions on agricultural ecological efficiency.Third,strengthening organizational support shortens knowledge distance.The improvement of the scale and degree of organizational support can shorten the cognitive distance,space-time distance,relationship distance and content distance,among which the communication duration between farmers and organizational support subjects has the greatest effect on knowledge distance,while the communication frequency,the number and type of organizational support subjects have relatively small impact on knowledge distance.The effect of organizational support on cognitive distance,space-time distance and content distance is more obvious in large-scale farmer samples,while the effect of organizational support on relationship distance is relatively strong in small-scale farmer samples.The impact of organizational support on cognitive distance and content distance is more obvious in the central and northern regions,and the impact on space-time distance and relationship distance is relatively prominent in the southern regions.Different types of organizational support subjects have different effects on knowledge distance.For cognitive distance,space-time distance and content distance,the role of informal organizations is greater than that of market-oriented organizations,government and public institutions;In terms of relationship distance,the role of government and public organizations is greater than that of informal organizations and marketoriented organizations.Fourth,shortening cognitive distance,space-time distance,relationship distance and content distance can improve agricultural ecological efficiency,of which cognitive distance has the greatest impact on agricultural ecological efficiency.The impact of cognitive distance and content distance on agricultural ecological efficiency is more obvious among large-scale farmers,the effect of relationship distance on agricultural ecological efficiency is basically the same in the two sub-samples,and the impact of space-time distance on agricultural ecological efficiency is more obvious among small-scale farmers.The impact of cognitive distance,spacetime distance and content distance on agricultural ecological efficiency is more prominent in the central and northern regions,and the impact of relationship distance is more obvious in the southern region.There are synergistic effects among cognitive distance,space-time distance,relationship distance and content distance,which means that the reduction of one dimension distance can enhance the effect of other dimensions on agricultural ecological efficiency.Fifth,knowledge distance plays partial mediating role in the impact of organizational support on agricultural ecological efficiency.The mechanism path of space-time distance and content distance is relatively prominent,while the mechanism path of relationship distance and cognitive distance is relatively not obvious.In the influence of organization type on agricultural ecological efficiency,the mediating role from maximum to minimum is space-time distance,content distance,relationship distance and cognitive distance.In the influence of organization number on agricultural ecological efficiency,the mediating role from maximum to minimum is space-time distance,content distance,cognitive distance and relationship distance.In the influence of communication frequency on agricultural ecological efficiency,the mediating effect maximum to minimum is content distance,space-time distance,cognitive distance and relationship distance.In the influence of communication duration on agricultural ecological efficiency,the mediating effect from maximum to minimum is space-time distance,content distance,cognitive distance and relationship distance.The inspiration of this paper for improving agricultural ecological efficiency is as follows:First,policymakers should improve the rural governance system continuously to form a rural ecological governance pattern of "government guidance,model drive,scientific and technological support,and farmers’ participation".Policymakers should give full play to the different roles of various organizations in improving agricultural ecological efficiency,enhance the degree of organizational support on the basis of ensuring the scale of organizational support,and give full play to farmers’ subjective and dynamic role.Second,efforts should be made to pay full attention to the bridging role of knowledge distance,such as strengthening the dissemination of agricultural ecological concepts and ecological knowledge,strengthening farmers’ awareness of the value of agricultural green production,paying attention to the timeliness and short distance of the dissemination of ecological knowledge,paying attention to the usefulness and ease of using knowledge,and encouraging agricultural technicians,cooperatives,agricultural technology stations and agricultural materials dealers to establish a highly trusting relationship embedded structure with farmers.Third,it is necessary to actively explore the supporting path of different organization types,and achieve model drive,technical services,and market support.Some measures are as follows: cultivating new business entities,improving the agricultural technology extension model,innovating the modes of agricultural service,improving the agricultural productive service market,paying attention to the establishment of rural informal organizations,and amplifying the positive interaction mechanism of agricultural ecological production technology.The possible innovations of this paper are as follows: First,in terms of research perspective,based on the public goods attribute of rural environment and the production decision-making process of farmers,we adopt the external environmental variable of organizational support and the mediating mechanism variable of knowledge distance to seek the best way to improve agricultural ecological efficiency.Second,in terms of research methods,the net carbon sink is adopted as the environmental output of the planting industry,which effectively matches the net carbon sink characteristics of the planting industry.By combining the farmer model with the target input model of technology learning,we provide a new analytical framework for finding the optimal path to improve agricultural ecological efficiency.Using various econometric methods,we effectively verify the causal relationship between organizational support and agricultural ecological efficiency and the mediating effect of knowledge distance.Thirdly,in terms of research content,based on the public goods attribute of rural environment,the inputoutput perspective and the theory of farmers’ behavior,we manage to build an analytical framework that combines rural grass-roots governance and agricultural ecological efficiency,which not only enriches the application of rural social governance theory in agricultural environmental economics,but also expands the theoretical application of knowledge distance in agricultural economy,especially in farmers’ behavior. |
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