China's Agricultural Water-Use Efficiency and Its Influencing Factors under the Constraint of Pollution Emission

Abstract

To ensure the sustainability of agriculture in China, it is critical to improve the agricultural water-use efficiency (AWE) under the constraint of pollution emission. Based on the 2011-2015 panel data of the inputs and outputs of provincial AWE in China, this paper measures the AWE of each provincial administrative region (hereinafter referred to as province) in China under the constraint of pollution emission, using the minimum distance to strong efficient frontier (MinDS) model, and analyzes the main factors affecting China's AWE under the constraint of pollution emission with a selfdesigned panel Tobit model. The results show that: (1) Under the constraint of pollution emission, the AWE in China generally remained on high levels, but with significant interand intra-regional differences; (2) Under the said constraint, there was a great gap between Chinese regions and provinces in pure technical water use and large-scale water use; (3) the scarcity of water resources and the level of economic development have significant positive impacts on the AWE; the development of crop farming, the development of animal husbandry, the construction of farmland water conservancy, crop planting structure, and drought have significant negative impacts on the AWE. On this basis, several policy suggestions were presented to improve China's AWE under the constraint of pollution emission.

The Equilibrium Mechanism of Interest Distribution in Farmland Transfer: Based on the Perspective of the Three-Party Game

“…Farmland transfer is conducive to an increase in income in rural high-income groups, thus widening the income gap of farmers [25], and collective transfer of farmland aggravates the income gap. Another conclusion is that farmland transfer will narrow the rural income gap and reduce income inequality [26,27]. Farmland has little effect on reducing rural income inequality, so policy makers need to encourage poor farmers to transfer out farmland [28]; in areas with underdeveloped economy and low income of land units, farmland transfer improves income distribution [29].…”

Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of China’s Agricultural Environmental Efficiency

“…Against this backdrop, it is imminent to promote the sustainable development of agriculture. To coordinate the development between agricultural growth, resource utilization, and eco-environmental protection, it is of great significance to include the pollutants generated in agricultural production into the analysis framework of agricultural environmental efficiency (AEE) and adopt scientific measures to evaluate the current AEE level of China [1][2][3].…”

Impacts of Urbanization on Extreme Regional Precipitation Events

“…Urbanization can alter the underlying surface properties and the regional precipitation, both of which often lead to serious urban waterlogging problems [25,26]. us, it is of great importance to understand the impact of urbanization on precipitation [27,28]. Existing studies on this subject mostly focus on analyzing daily precipitation data to obtain the trends of precipitation, while there is little research on extreme precipitation events of short duration, which are more likely to cause urban waterlogging [29,30].…”