A data envelopment analysis of agricultural technical efficiency of Northwest Arid Areas in China

Abstract

Severe resource shortage and waste of resource in agricultural production make it necessary to assess efficiency to increase productivity with high efficiency and ensure sustainable agricultural development. This paper adopted an input-oriented data envelopment analysis (DEA) method with the assumption of variable returns to scale to evaluate agricultural production efficiency of 100 major irrigation districts in Northwest China in 2010. Major findings of this paper were as follows: firstly, the average value of total technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of those irrigation districts in Northwest China were 0.770, 0.825 and 0.931, respectively; secondly, 30% of irrigation districts were technically efficient, while 42% and 32% of them showed pure technical and scale efficiency respectively. Among inefficient decision-making units, total technical efficiency score varied from 0.313 to 0.966, showing significant geographical differences, but geographical differences of pure technical efficiency was more consistent with that of total technical efficiency; thirdly, input redundancy was evident. Inputs of agricultural population, irrigation area, green water, blue water, consumption of fertilizer and agricultural machinery could be reduced by 34.88%, 40.19%, 43.85%, 47.10%, 41.53% and 42.21% respectively without reducing agricultural outputs. Furthermore, irrigation area, green water and blue water had relatively high slack movement though Northwest China which is short of water resources. Based on these results, this paper drew the following conclusions: First, there is huge potential for Northwest China to improve its agricultural production efficiency, and agro-technology not input scale had greater influence on improvement. Second, farmers needed proper guidance in order to reduce agricultural inputs and it is time to centralize agricultural management for overall agricultural inputs regulation and control.

Keywords

agricultural production efficiency / DEA model / input redundancy / irrigation districts / Northwest Arid Areas in China

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The Author(s) 2017. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)