Spatiotemporal Evolution and Influencing Factors of China's Agricultural Environmental Efficiency

Taking the 30 Chinese provinces in 2000-2018 as the objects, this paper measures their agricultural environmental efficiencies (AEEs) with slack-based measure (SBM) containing an undesired output. Then, the features of the spatiotemporal evolution of AEE in China were explored on ArcGIS, and the factors affecting the AEE were analyzed with a geodetector. The results show that there is a huge provincial gap in AEE across China; most provinces with a high AEE belong to eastern coastal region, while most inland provinces had a relatively low AEE. Except for a few years, the AEEs in eastern, central, and western regions changed very slightly, and the eastern region had a higher AEE level than central and western regions. The results of spatiotemporal evolution show that, with the elapse of time, the high- AEE provinces gradually shifted to the inland; the AEE trend varied from province to province; the provinces were highly polarized in terms of AEE. The AEE is mainly affected by the following factors: fiscal expenditure, fertilizer intensity, pesticide intensity, and economic growth.