Economic growth of green agriculture and its influencing factors in china: Based on emergy theory and spatial econometric model

Abstract

Based on emergy theory, this paper calculates the agricultural green GDP of China and its provincial units from 2003 to 2018. Following this, the spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors of the economic growth of green agriculture in China are studied using the spatial analysis method. The results show that: (1) Compared with the traditional GDP derived from agriculture, the per capita green agriculture GDP growth in China is relatively slow, and the proportion of green agriculture GDP to the traditional GDP from agriculture is between 85 and 91%, which shows a downward trend. (2) The economic growth of China's green agriculture manifests significant spatial agglomeration, with gradually growing effects. (3) The per capita GDP of green agriculture has not broken the overall pattern of high economic growth in China’s eastern regions and low growth in the western. According to the results, the major cause of this spatial pattern lay in the higher efficiency of agricultural production in the eastern, economically more developed areas, and the relatively less efficient mode of production in the western areas. (4) A region’s level of economic development, technological innovation, infrastructure investment and openness were found to have a positive impact on the growth of green agriculture within it. In previous research, emergy methods have not been applied to study the economic sectors in China, the largest developing country in the world, especially in the agricultural sector. Only few studies report on the analysis of spatial characteristics and factors influencing the growth of green agriculture. The agricultural green GDP was calculated based on the emergy analysis method. The temporal and spatial characteristics, as well as the driving factors of green agriculture GDP, were analyzed under the full consideration of the spatial correlation, which contributes to the theoretical explanation of spatial agglomeration of economic factors in spatial economic theory. The conclusions provide a theoretical and practical basis for accurate evaluation of the green growth of China's agricultural economy, optimization of the spatial structure of the country’s green agricultural economy and coordination of the development of green agriculture in different regions.