Agricultural growth dynamics and decision mechanism in Chinese provinces: 1988‐2008

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to perform an investigative analysis of the distribution of agricultural growth in China and the evolution of the decision mechanism.Design/methodology/approach – The kernel density estimation method was used to investigate the distribution of agricultural growth in China using 1988‐2008 panel data of the 29 provinces on the mainland. A nonparametric income distribution approach was employed to decompose China's agricultural output growth into farmland accumulation, capital deepening, labor‐scale change, technical change, and efficiency change based on stochastic frontier function. A further investigation of the evolution of the decision mechanism for agricultural growth was then performed using counterfactual analysis.Findings – The results of this analysis indicate that: from 1996, the distribution of agricultural output per worker evolved from a unimodal into a bimodal distribution; technical change is the primary impetus to distribution shift; and capital deepeni...