Agricultural Services: Another Way of Farmland Utilization and Its Effect on Agricultural Green Total Factor Productivity in China

Improving agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP) is an important aspect of sustainable agricultural development. Agricultural services, a new way of farmland utilization in agricultural production, solved the problem of ‘who and how to farm’ in the context of labor off-farm migration. The literature has analyzed different factors that affect AGTFP, but there is a relative dearth of research into agricultural services and AGTFP. Therefore, based on the panel data of 31 provinces from 2011 to 2020, this study firstly measured carbon emissions in agricultural production and then took it as an unexpected output to measure the AGTFP by using the global Malmquist–Luenberger (GML) productivity index. Finally, the effect of agricultural services on AGTFP and its decomposition were empirically verified. The main findings are as follows: (1) Between 2011 and 2020, agricultural carbon emissions increased from 85.63 million tons to 90.99 million tons in the first five years and decreased gradually to 78.64 million tons in 2020; the government policy significantly affects carbon emissions reduction. (2) AGTFP has been increasing for the past decade, and the average growth rate of AGTFP reached 1.016, and agricultural services promoted AGTFP growth significantly, in which technological progress was the crucial driving factor. (3) Taking the Heihe–Tengchong line as the demarcation, the improving effect of agricultural services on AGTFP in the eastern region is better than the western region.