Green productivity growth and convergence in Chinese agriculture

It has become a new trend for the future development of Chinese agriculture to accelerate the transformation from increasing production to improving quality and realizing green growth. This paper uses the sequential DEA to measure the agricultural green total factor productivity (GTFP) of 306 Chinese cities from 1996 to 2017, then tests its convergence. The results show that the average growth rate of Chinese agricultural GTFP is 0.58%; the main driving force coming from technical progress. The convergence of agricultural GTFP has dual characteristics of stages and regions, and the significant σ convergence only exists in the central region during 1996-2003. There is significant β convergence at the national level, in the eastern and central regions, and neither convergence nor divergence in the western region. However, during 2004-2017, only the eastern region had β convergence. Finally, the conditional convergence speed is higher than the absolute convergence, and the eastern region is higher than the central.