Measuring Green Total Factor Productivity of Chinese Agricultural and Rural Sector via Two-Stage Network DEA with Shared Inputs

Promoting green, sustainable, and coordinated development in the agricultural and rural sector is crucial for achieving high-quality development in China. By clarifying the internal linkages between the two stages, this study considers the agricultural and rural sector as an overall network system consisting of agricultural ecology and the rural economy with shared resources. In this framework, we propose efficiency measurements and global Luenberger productivity indices (GLPIs) for estimating the efficiency and productivity of the overall system and subsystems. Furthermore, we conduct a full decomposition of the proposed GLPI to identify the drivers of performance changes in the agro-ecological and rural economic system. The proposed methods are empirically applied to assess the efficiency and productivity of the agricultural and rural sector across 30 provinces in China. It is evident that the efficiencies of the overall system and the agro-ecological subsystem generally exhibit clear improvements after rural revitalization, whereas the efficiency of the rural economy remains relatively stable. Additionally, the GLPIs of the overall system and both subsystems of most provinces turn out to be positive after rural revitalization, which is mainly due to the positive best-practice gap (BPC) components. Lastly, whether we examine efficiency or GLPIs, regional heterogeneity is still evident.