Study on the Impact of the Rural Population Aging on Agricultural Total Factor Productivity in China

Guifang Su, Zhe Chen, Wei Li and Xianli Xia ()
Additional contact information
Guifang Su: College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China
Zhe Chen: College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China
Wei Li: College of Economics and Management, China Agricultural University, Beijing 100083, China
Xianli Xia: College of Economics and Management, Northwest A&F University, Yangling 712100, China

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 12, 1-18

Abstract: The rural population aging poses a great challenge to China’s agricultural production, which is dominated by small farmers. Based on the panel data of 30 provinces or cities (except Tibet) in China from 2005 to 2020, the DEA-Malmquist index is employed to measure the agricultural total factor productivity (ATFP) in each province (city), and then the mediation effect model is used to reveal the mechanism by which the rural population aging affects the ATFP through farmland transfer, agricultural social services, and agricultural machinery. The results show that the rural population aging has made a significant contribution to the ATFP, and farmland transfer, agricultural socialized services and agricultural machinery have a intermediary effect on the increase of the ATFP. Further decomposition of ATFP reveals that the rural population aging can significantly contribute to the scale efficiency and technical progress rate through farmland transfer, agricultural socialization services and agricultural machinery, but does not have a significant effect on pure technical efficiency. In order to promote the high-quality and high-efficiency development of agriculture in the context of population aging, it is necessary to optimize the market environment for farmland transfer, improve the agricultural socialized service system, and continue to strengthen agricultural science and technology innovation.

Keywords: rural population aging; agricultural total factor productivity; farmland transfer; agricultural socialization services; agricultural machinery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/12/2175/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/14/12/2175/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jagris:v:14:y:2024:i:12:p:2175-:d:1532494

Access Statistics for this article

Agriculture is currently edited by Ms. Leda Xuan

More articles in Agriculture from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().