Measuring the Efficiency of Agricultural Production Using Data Envelopment Analysis in Chongqing Municipality, China

Economic efficiency is a tool for sustainable analysis, indicating how efficient the economic production activity is with regard to inputs of resources and outputs of value. This paper conducted an economic efficiency analysis for regional agricultural production in Chongqing Municipality of China using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model. Using real data of 39 regions in Chongqing, an empirical study was employed to illustrate the pattern of regional agricultural production's efficiency. The results indicate that nine regions are technical efficiency under CRS assumption, while 15 regions achieve pure technical efficiency and nine regions reveal scale efficiency under VRS assumption. Furthermore, the results also show that regions with higher level of economic development will have relatively higher economic efficiency in agricultural production. This study provides deeper insights into the causes of economic inefficiency and gives further implications on agricultural production in Chongqing. In the end, the advantages and disadvantages of using DEA in efficiency analysis are discussed and areas that require further work are presented.