Agricultural Efficiency And Total Factor Productivity Growth In China

Agriculture is the foundation of the national economy. Only agriculturedeveloping very well, the other industries can make faster and better development.China faces the problem of resource disadvantage in developing agriculturalproduction. To promote the sound development of agriculture and safeguard foodsecurity, we should take a intensive farming road, and raising the agriculturalefficiency and Total Factor Productivity is the only way. First, excluding the badoutput of agriculture, the paper applies SBM directional distance function andLuenberger productivity indicator to measure the provincial agricultural efficiencyand TFP in china over the period1995-2008, and make a analysis of regional variesand time series change. Second, for reviewing the eco-environment influence ofagriculture production, agriculture bad output is included in our empirical research tomeasure the environmental efficiency and environmental TFP growth. We comparethe results under the two different circumstances. Third, we empirically examine theinfluence factors of efficiency and TFP changes.The major conclusions are as follows: when including the bad outputs, theprovinces in eastern regions experience higher agricultural efficiency than in centreand western regions, output deficiency, overuse of livestock and unreasonableframework of sowing area are the main sources of agricultural inefficiency. Thegrowth of agricultural TFP in china is5.58percent, mainly because of the technologyprogress and technology progress scale change. The provinces in the eastern regionsexperience highest agricultural TFP. Considering environment restraint, theagricultural inefficiency level is higher, the provinces in eastern regions stillexperience the highest efficiency, then the provinces in western regions, the centreprovinces has the lowest efficiency. The main reason of agricultural environmentinefficient is the discharge of three kind of bad output—COD, TN, TP, yielding fromthe agricultural production progress. The agricultural environmental TFP issignificantly lower than before not considering the environment factors. Enhancing the education of agriculture practitioners can speed up the growth of agriculturalefficiency, the popularization of mechanization can push agricultural TFP ahead.