Agricultural Total Factor Productivity Growth in China under the Binding of Resource and Environment

As an important indicator of agricultural growth performance,agricultural total factor productivity has attracted considerable attention.Agricultural total factor productivity measurement has mostly considered traditional inputs such as capital,labor and land,rarely taking resource and environmental factors into consideration.This is a biased evaluation and is unable to reflect the real growth performance of agriculture.Here,we apply the malmquist-luenberger productivity index to estimate agricultural total factor productivity accounting for water resource and agricultural non-point source pollution in China from 1998 to 2009.Fertilizer,animal,labor,machine,sown area and water consumption were considered as input indicators;provincial agricultural output value and agricultural non-point source pollution were considered as good output and bad output,respectively.We found that water resource and agricultural non-point source pollution had a significant influence on the measurement of agricultural total factor productivity growth.So it makes sense to take natural resources and agriculture environmental pollution into account when measuring agricultural productivity growth rates.Overall agricultural total factor productivity under the constraint of resource and environment is 1.029 and very low,implying that agricultural economic rapid growth is at the expense of natural resource destruction and agriculture environmental pollution in China.The agricultural total factor productivity incorporating water resource and agricultural non-point source pollution is different among provinces and municipalities.Provinces in Eastern China have higher agricultural total factor productivity,while provinces in Central and Western China have lower agricultural total factor productivity.The coordination task of agricultural economic growth and environmental protection and resourcesaving is arduous in Central and Western China.Our results indicate that the environmental pollution and resource destruction problem in China remain a serious problem.Transforming the agricultural development mode,and the popularization of environmentally-friendly and resource-saving techniques should be promoted to improve agricultural growth performance.