Rural Education, Technological Progress and Productivity Growth in China's Agriculture

Abstract

This paper examines the impacts of rural education on agricultural productivity in China. The approach we take involves two-stage process. First, we use DEA_Malmquist method to measure total factor productivity change, technical change and efficiency change in China over the period 1985 to 2011. We find that China has experienced an increase in total factor productivity, and that productivity growth was mostly attributed to technical progress, rather than to improvement in efficiency. And then, with a panel dataset covering 30 provinces, we investigate the impact of rural education on productivity growth of China. The results indicated that the development of rural education plays positive role on China’s agricultural productivity growth. Moreover, empirical results of regression models show that rural education enhances agricultural total factor productivity through technological progress rather than by promoting technical efficiency.