Measuring the Cultivated Land Use Efficiency in China: A Super Efficiency MinDS Model Approach

Abstract

Cultivated land is a vital strategic resource to ensure human survival and development. It is pertinent to introduce the environmental constraint index into the study of cultivated land use efficiency and promote the coordinated development of environmental and economic benefits. Based on the construction of the evaluation index system of cultivated land use efficiency, including carbon emission as the undesired output, this paper used the super efficiency MinDS model to measure the cultivated land use efficiency of China by using the data from 2009 to 2019. The results show the following. (1) During 2009–2019, the overall use efficiency of cultivated land in China showed a tendency to fluctuate and increase, ranging from 0.871 to 0.948, indicating high use efficiency. Eleven provinces had an average land use efficiency of more than 1. (2) Among the input–output indicators, the carbon emission indicator showed the largest average percentage of improvement at 15.21%, followed by the pesticide index and agricultural machinery index, and the smallest average improvement was the irrigation indicator at 3.55%. (3) There were apparent differences in the average relaxation and improvement proportion of input–output indicators of cultivated land use in the provinces. (4) China’s cultivated land use efficiency has absolute σ-convergence, absolute β-convergence and conditional β-convergence, which means that the difference in cultivated land use efficiency between provinces has a tendency to decrease, and that China’s cultivated land use efficiency will stabilize. This paper provides a clear direction for the promotion and improvement of cultivated land use efficiency in China.

Spatiotemporal differences, dynamic evolution and trend of cultivated land use efficiency: Based on three food functional areas

“…Nevertheless, measuring their efficiency becomes somewhat inaccurate in the presence of non-zero slack in inputs or outputs. To address these issues, Tone [ 31 ] constructed the super-efficient SBM model [ [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] , [36] ]. This model effectively addresses the issue of all DMU efficiencies being 1, which complicates the differentiation between efficient DMUs.…”

Cultivated Land Green Use Efficiency and Its Influencing Factors: A Case Study of 39 Cities in the Yangtze River Basin of China

“…The sharp decrease of cultivated land area and the enormous population have brought great challenges to global agricultural development. In addition, with the improvement in science and technology, the input of pesticides, fertilizers and other production used in the agricultural production process also increases total global carbon emissions, thus bringing environmental problems such as global warming, which is contrary to the concept of green and sustainable development [4]. Therefore, on the basis of efficient and reasonable utilization of cultivated land resources, the concept of green and low-carbon production has become the focus of sustainable agricultural development.…”

“…Data envelope analysis (DEA) [5,13,14], random frontier production function [15], SBM [16][17][18] and other methods [19,20] are mostly used for empirical analysis. (3) In terms of the research subjects, most research has focused on urban land [13,15,21], followed by agricultural land [4,22,23] and a small number of studies involving forests and grassland [24]. In general, CLGUE has barely been discussed in existing studies.…”