Theoretical and Empirical Studies of Productivity Growth in the Agricultural Economics - Cases of China and the United States

This article investigates agricultural productivity growth over several decades, emphasizing to a great extent the agricultural economic development condition for the nine agricultural divisions of the United States, and China's 27 provinces in terms of Malmquist productivity growth index. The paper sets up a technique to make use of two-stage linear programming method, based on sequential production technology, to estimate the most fitted and reliable distance functions in relevant agricultural sectors, and thus to compute the Malmquist productivity indexes. Especially, it proposes to decompose the productivity growth index into two major components, technical progress and efficiency improvement, and their sub-components, to study the sources of growth in productivity. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier B.V. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of ICAPIE Organization Committee.