Interplay between China’s grain self-sufficiency policy shifts and interregional, intertemporal productivity differences

In 2013, the Communist Party of China decided to partially relax its self-sufficiency targets for grain, historically first recognizing moderate imports as a policy option for ensuring food security in the country. This study empirically examines the interplay between the policy shifts and the interregional, intertemporal productivity differences in Chinese agriculture. It employs a meta-frontier stochastic output distance function approach. Our empirical result shows that input augmentation was the main contributor to the agricultural output growth during 1984–2000, whereas total factor productivity is the main driver of the growth during 2001–2020. This lends strong support to an argument in the literature that Chinese crop production has recently transformed from a resource-input-driven activity to one driven by science and technology. Our study also demonstrates that the western region, which far lagged behind others in the past in terms of agricultural technology, has made remarkable progress during 2001–2020, which confirms the cross-regional productivity convergence over time. It is likely that farmers in this region were better able to gain a higher economic return from crop diversification into horticulture, for which they might have been all the more motivated to improve their productivity.