Agricultural efficiency, technical change and productivity in China

Xiaobing Wang and Supawat Rungsuriyawiboon

Post-Communist Economies, 2010, vol. 22, issue 2, 207-227

Abstract: Economic reform in China helped transform the structure and volume of agricultural production and resulted in significant changes in efficiency and productivity. This article measures agricultural technical efficiency (TE) and total factor productivity (TFP) in China by including all producers in different groups operating under their own technologies. A metafrontier function approach is applied using a panel data set on 28 provinces during 1991-2005. The provinces are categorised into advanced and low-technology provinces. Based on the metafrontier estimation, TFP growth is decomposed into TE change (TEC), technical change (TC) and scale efficiency change (SEC). Our major findings indicate that TC contributed most to Chinese agricultural TFP growth throughout the period of study. SEC and TEC exhibited negative effects on TFP growth for the advanced and low-technology provinces respectively. Most of the advanced-technology provinces exhibited higher TE than the low-technology provinces. The comparatively low TE scores in the low-technology provinces imply that the low-technology provinces were operating far from the metafrontier. The results also show that labour and fertiliser still make important contributions to output, and thus improving the quality of farmers and applying modern physical inputs is also crucial to TFP growth.

Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14631371003740704 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:taf:pocoec:v:22:y:2010:i:2:p:207-227

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/CPCE20

DOI: 10.1080/14631371003740704

Access Statistics for this article

Post-Communist Economies is currently edited by Roger Clarke

More articles in Post-Communist Economies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().