The total factor productivity index of freshwater aquaculture in China: based on regional heterogeneity.

Shen Zhong,Aizhi Li,Jing Wu

doi:10.1007/s11356-021-16504-8

Abstract

Continuously improving freshwater aquaculture efficiency will promote the sustainable development of freshwater aquaculture, which is crucial to ensure aquatic food supply. In particular, measuring the total factor productivity (TFP) of freshwater aquaculture to find ways to improve its efficiency is of great significance to sustainable development of freshwater aquaculture industry. Therefore, based on directional distance function, this paper constructs a meta-frontier Malmquist index (MMI) model by considering the regional heterogeneity to evaluate the TFP of freshwater aquaculture of China from 2004 to 2019. The results show that (1) from the perspective of time, TFP fluctuated significantly from 2004 to 2012, while after 2013, TFP remained around 1 with small fluctuation. In other words, freshwater aquaculture in China began to maintain a relatively negative state of development. (2) From a regional point of view, this study found that freshwater aquaculture TFP of inland region is better than the TFP of coastal region. (3) From the decomposition index, the variation of freshwater aquaculture TFP was driven by the combined effect of technology change (TC) and technical efficiency change (EC). In addition, the decomposition index efficiency shows that the technical efficiency decreases and the management efficiency changes little. (4) The gap of freshwater aquaculture technology in coastal areas is very small, and close to the optimal technical level. While in inland region, on the contrary, there is more room for improvement. According to the above empirical results, this paper finally gives some policy suggestions to improve the TFP to ensure the sustainable development of freshwater aquaculture.

Highlights

As an important food for human daily consumption, fish provides people with indispensable amino acids and protein (Merino et al, 2012)
The results show that the technical level of freshwater aquaculture in coastal region has reached 99.7% of the meta-frontier level, while that in inland region has only reached 74%
This paper constructs a double-hierarchy meta-frontier Malmquist index based on the directional distance function (DDF)-data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to calculate the freshwater aquaculture total factor productivity (TFP) of 28 provinces in

Summary

Introduction

As an important food for human daily consumption, fish provides people with indispensable amino acids and protein (Merino et al, 2012). China is the main producer of farmed edible fish and has produced more of such edible fish than other countries combined every year since 1991(FAO, 2018). Edible fish plays an increasingly important role in China's food supply (Troell et al, 2014). To ensure the demand of residents for fish food, it is significant to continuously improve the efficiency of fishery culture (Muir, 2005). As the main production mode of fishery aquaculture, freshwater aquaculture efficiency measurement is of great significance to improve the efficiency of aquaculture and ensuring the aquatic biomass. This paper will measure and analyze the total factor productivity of freshwater aquaculture in China, and get the sustainable development strategy of freshwater aquaculture through the analysis of the efficiency

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion