Growth and Sources of Agricultural Total Factor Productivity in China under Environmental Regulations

Using the unit investigation and evaluation method(unit analysis) to evaluate the agricultural non-point source pollution(NSP) of each province in China,this paper applies the Malmquist-Luenberger productivity Index method which is based on the directional distance function(DDF) to calculate the agricultural TFP growth and its components accounting for environmental regulations at the provincial level of China from 1978 to 2008.So the agricultural growth,resource conservation and environmental protection have been integrated into a unified framework.The main conclusions are as follows:(1) Accounting for the environmental regulations,the agricultural TFP growth is slightly positive.It is mainly driven by the frontier technological progress(TP) and there is slight improvement in the situation of environmental technical efficiency(ETE).The dynamic tendency of agricultural TFP growth can be classified into six phases in 1978-2008.(2) Taking overall consideration of resource conservation,environmental protection and agricultural growth,the differences among regional TFP growth and its modes are significant.In general,the eastern region is better than the western region,while the central region maybe in the situation of un-equilibrium.(3) Three municipalities,Beijing,Shanghai,and Tianjin directly under the central government in east coastal region as well as some remote and border provinces like Qinghai,Guizhou and Ningxia in western region lead the agricultural environmental technology innovation directly.(4) Whether to consider the cost of environmental pollution or not has a significant influence on the calculation of agricultural TFP growth,and maybe leads to the biased error of policy.