China's agricultural water-use efficiency and its influencing factors under the constraint of pollution emission

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 self-designed 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 inter- and 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. © 2020 WITPress. All rights reserved.