The Total Factor Productivity Change And Convergence Analysis For China's Coastal Fisheries

Total Factor Productivity (TFP) can exam the efficiency of input factors comprehensive and systematic, it reflects that other technical and institutional factors in addition to inputs impact output. TFP is more widely used in the empirical research. The existing studies use it measure the status of the economy from the point of view of different countries, regions and industry, however, the analysis of the fisheries'TFP has not yet the systematic conformation. To research the economic efficiency of fisheries for more comprehensive and scientific, the article gets coastal fisheries as a research object, while coastal areas are divided the Yellow Sea, the East Sea, the South Sea according to the environment in the analysis process, in order to inspect regional differences of the economic development of coastal fisheries.Based on the eleven provincial panel data of coastal areas for 1988-2009, the Malmquist index of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is used to check the TFP change of fisheries, and their convergence are analyzed. The results show that in the change of power source, the growth of coastal fisheries TFP annual average is negative, the "Growth Effect" of the technical progress is obvious, the "Level effect" of the technical efficiency not only does not play a role in improvement, but limiting its growth. The technical progress has played "Growth Effect" for the TFP change in the three areas, technical efficiency of the Yellow Sea region limits its growth; the East Sea region plays no role; the South Sea region plays a significant improvement. It's the main reason that the low level of technology causes increasing and decrement of returns to scale for Tianjin, Hebei, Guangxi, Liaoning, Zhejiang, Shandong and Guangdong province.The economic growth of China's coastal fisheries shows the characteristic that promotion of the technical efficiency drives its growth, the improvement of the technical level is the main driving force. The scale is a key factor in its growth in the region's economic development of fisheries. There are the clear periodic and regional differences for TFP convergence of coastal fisheries. The test of convergence and the judgment of technical diffusion's path show that they're feasible entirely to reduce the gap among provincial and regional TFP growth of fisheries, promote the technical diffusion among provinces and regions, thus to achieve coordinated development among regions.