Does Fertilizer Education Program Increase the Technical Efficiency of Chemical Fertilizer Use? Evidence from Wheat Production in China

Pingping Wang, Wendong Zhang (), Minghao Li and Yijun Han

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: Farmers in China and many other developing countries suffer from low technical efficiency of chemical fertilizer use, which leads to excessive nutrient runoff and other environmental problems. A major cause of the low efficiency is lack of science-based information and recommendations for nutrient application. In response, the Chinese government launched an ambitious nationwide program called the “Soil Testing and Fertilizer Recommendation Project” (STFRP) in 2005 to increase the efficiency of chemical fertilizer use. However, there has been no systematic evaluation of this program. Using data from a nationally representative household survey, and using wheat as an example, this paper first quantifies the technical efficiency of chemical fertilizer use (TEFU) by conducting stochastic frontier analysis (SFA), then evaluates the impact of STFRP on the TEFU using a generalized difference-in-difference approach. We found that STFRP, on average, increased TEFU in wheat production by about 4%, which was robust across various robustness checks. The lessons learned from STFRP will be valuable for China’s future outreach efforts, as well as for other countries considering similar nutrient management policies.

Date: 2019-01-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-eff and nep-tra
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... eb9d77e32c1c/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Fertilizer Education Program Increase the Technical Efficiency of Chemical Fertilizer Use? Evidence from Wheat Production in China (2019)
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:isu:genstf:201901010800001678

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().