Abstract
The Chinese government has made great efforts to improve the scale efficiency of land through various measures during recent years, hoping to realize the coordinated developing goal of promoting agricultural benefits and protecting the environment. Statistics show that China’s land scale efficiency has steadily increased, but agricultural nonpoint source (NPS) pollution has also increased, which seems contrary to the expected outcome. Can increasing scale efficiency really curb agricultural NPS pollution? This study uses provincial-level data from China, together with a panel model and spatial econometric model, to investigate the relationship between scale efficiency and agricultural NPS pollution. It is found that the increase of scale efficiency aggravates the agricultural NPS pollution, and the conclusion still holds after considering spatial effect. The results of spatial analysis shows that the agricultural NPS pollution is spatially dependent. Further decomposition of the spatial effect shows that the scale efficiency not only intensifies the local agricultural NPS pollution, but also has a spillover effect (though not statistically significant) on agricultural NPS pollution in the surrounding areas. It is worth noting that financial policy, raising wage income and upgrading industrial structure can effectively curb agricultural NPS pollution in this region and adjacent areas, which also deserves our attention in the control of agricultural NPS pollution. In addition, it is necessary to make financial and fiscal support policies specifically for the governance of agricultural NPS pollution, adjust the distorted prices of input factors such as chemicals and pesticide, and accelerate the transformation of small-sized farmers to family farms, in order to maximize the inhibitory effect of scale efficiency on relieving agricultural NPS pollution.
Highlights
Many developing countries are faced with low production efficiency and serious environmental pollution
The results indicate that agricultural nonpoint source (NPS) pollution is spatially dependent, and it is necessary to use spatial models to estimate spatial effects
As if shown in regression results, it can be found that the coefficients ρ of model (4) to model (9) are all significantly positive, indicating that agricultural NPS pollution has an inter-provincial spatial interaction effect
Summary
Many developing countries are faced with low production efficiency and serious environmental pollution. In order to improve sustainable development in agriculture, many governments in developing countries have proposed to transform and upgrade their agricultural systems. The Chinese government has proposed achieving high-quality development in agriculture many times, and the core content of high-quality development is to increase total factor productivity (TFP). TFP includes pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and technological progress, among which scale efficiency is repeatedly mentioned in policy level and highly promoted in practice. The Chinese government has introduced a series of policies to encourage the farmers to expand the cultivated area, purchase trusteeship of agricultural production and participate in contract agriculture, increasing the scale efficiency steadily. There are many ways to improve scale efficiency, and good results have been achieved in agricultural production practice. In China, the most common ways to increase scale efficiency are mainly divided into two categories. One type is driven by the transformation of land, such as encouraging farmers to transfer their land to large professional family farm
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
