Study On Chinese Agricultural Total Factor Productivity,Regional Disparities And Convergence

This paper makes total factor productivity(TFP) to be the research object, taking the Chinese regional agricultural development difference as the research starting point, using parametric and non-parametric methods to compute our country’s agricultural total factor productivity growth of28provinces from1982to2008.Firstly, using Malmquist index approach which is based on data envelopment analysis, this paper decomposes agricultural TFP growth into technical progress, pure technical efficiency change and scale efficiency change, analyze and explain the fluctuation trend and regional disparities of TFP and its decomposition components. The result shows that since1982Chinese agricultural TFP has showed an overall growth, the TFP growth has been mainly from technical progress and the decline in technical efficiency has offseted to a certain extent the effect of improving the level of agricultural technology, in which pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency are both negative growth. It performs the characteristics of unbalanced growth between different regions, that eastern region remains high while middle and western regions remain low.Secondly, by transcendental logarithmic stochastic frontier model, this article further analyzes the change of TFP and technical efficiency between different provinces and investigates the factors influencing agricultural technical efficiency. Based on the results of a comparative study of the two models,the result shows that both reach the same conclusion, confirm each other.Finally, this paper, basing on calculating the TFP growth, makes tests of absolute convergence and conditional convergence for agricultural TFP between different regions with economic growth convergence theory. To find out the reasons for the disparities of agricultural TFP between different regions, absolute convergence tests are made for components of decomposition. The results show that, during the entire sample period, there exists significant conditional convergence within three areas, while technical progress and technical efficiency eventually causing the absolute divergence effects of provinces. The inter-provincial gaps of agricultural TFP will not unconditionally shrink over time.