Regional disparity of factor endowment and agricultural labor productivity in China

Since the introduction of the household responsibility system, China¡¯s agricultural economy has been growing with the enlargement of regional labor productivity disparity. Based on the traditional decomposition technique for the research of agricultural economic growth, this paper uses the Blinder-Oaxaca approach to decompose the regional disparity of agricultural labor productivity, and gives corresponding reasons. It is shown that, factor endowment disparity is an important reason which affects the agricultural labor productivity of different regions in China; it explains 38.26% of the agricultural labor productivity disparity between the Eastern and the Western China, and 71.56% between the Eastern and the Central China. The rest part of the agricultural labor productivity disparity is mainly caused by the output elasticities of the input factors.