A Study on Integrating Production Efficiency and Allocation Efficiency into Economic Efficiency Based on the Value Chain—A Case Study of the Dongting Lake Region

Economic efficiency plays a crucial role in both resource conservation and food security, which is why numerous scholars have expressed a keen interest in improving production stage efficiency. Nevertheless, only a few have studied allocation stage efficiency, and even fewer researchers have explored production stage efficiency in close conjunction with allocation stage efficiency. As a result, this paper constructs a two-stage dynamic network SBM model based on the value chain theory, taking 24 counties (cities and districts) in Dongting Lake Region, the most typical region in China, as a case study, and integrating the production and allocation stages. The conclusions are as follows: (1) Economic efficiency is heterogeneous in both time and space. (2) Production stage efficiency and allocation stage efficiency are always positively or negatively correlated, and the different correlations reflect the different situations in the production stage and allocation stage. (3) The production stage and allocation stage efficiency can help us to identify the weak links in the agricultural production process so as to realize the target. The research methodology in this paper can not only be applied to the analysis of multi-stage efficiency, but the production efficiency can also be expanded to multi-dimensional efficiency, which involves economic efficiency, ecological efficiency and social efficiency.