Abstract
This article estimates technical and environmental efficiencies using the stochastic frontier analysis with panel data of twenty-two main apple production provinces in China during 1992–2014. Results show that the environmental efficiency for pesticide input alone has lower mean value of 0.337 than environmental efficiency for the two environmentally detrimental inputs, pesticide and chemical fertilizer, which is 0.782. Furthermore, all efficiency scores have decreasing trends over time. Loess Plateau is more environmentally efficient than the Bohai bay region. Results of output elasticities show that chemical fertilizer has a mean value of 0.225, which is higher than for material, labor, and pesticide input. Also, apple production in China experiences decreasing returns to scale. Finally, it is also discovered that labor and chemical fertilizer have a substitute relationship, while material and labor have a complementary relationship, as do chemical fertilizer and pesticide. The results from the study should prove useful for reallocating input resources and improving environmental efficiency.
Highlights
The agriculture sector has always been a fundamental corner stone underpinning the Chinese economy
The first national survey of pollution sources in the year of 2010 in China shows that total agricultural chemical oxygen demand, total nitrogen, and total phosphorus emissions from agricultural production activities accounted for 43.7 percent, 57.2 percent, and 67.4 percent of total emissions, respectively, indicating that agricultural pollution has exceeded industrial pollution and become the largest source of pollution in China
The stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) model developed in Reinhard et al (1999, 2000) for dairy farming is adopted in this study for apple production as a result of the similiarities they share in pollution sources and has advantages over data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the purpose of accommodating the the random nature of agricultural production
Summary
This article estimates technical and environmental efficiencies using the stochastic frontier analysis with panel data of twenty-two main apple production provinces in China during 1992–2014. Li et al (2011) estimate the environmental efficiency of China’s agriculture sector using the SBM model taking environmental detrimental factors, such as emissions quantity of nitrogen and phosphorus, as undesired output variables and shows an average environmental efficiency of 0.450 during 1979–2008. Zhang and Xue (2005) measure the environmental efficiency of China’s vegetable production using this SFA method taking chemical fertilizer and pesticide as environmentally detrimental inputs, finding different vegetable varieties had different environmental efficiency ranging from 0.426 to 0.977. Zhou et al (2015) estimate the environmental efficiency of hog production in China by SFA taking the undesired output of nitrate surplus as an input, showing an average environmental efficiency of 0.672 with a declining trend over time. We estimate technical efficiency and environmental efficiency of apple production in China focusing on the excessive use of chemical fertilizer and pesticide. The Conclusion section ends the manuscript with a brief conclusion and a discussion of policy implications
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