Efficiency analysis of funding resources for rural revitalization in China based on the concept of sustainable development: evidence from parallel DEA with shared inputs/outputs and Tobit models

Funding support is essential to the comprehensive implementation of China’s rural revitalization strategy. However, no consensus has currently emerged in the academics and industry on how to measure the efficiency of funding to rural revitalization system (FRRS). In this context, it is of great importance to construct workable measures to depict the FRRS performance. According to the content of rural revitalization strategy, this paper first regards rural revitalization as a network system consisting of five parallel subsystems that interact with each other, and the agricultural loans and fiscal allocations as the shared inputs are consumed for the five subsystems. On this basis, we propose a shared input–output parallel process for FRRS. Second, following the proposed input–output process, we construct a parallel data envelopment analysis (DEA) model with shared inputs/outputs to measure the efficiency of FRRS, where the link between the efficiency of FRRS and its subsystems is further discussed. Third, the Tobit panel model is employed to identify the external factors that affect the obtained FRRS efficiency. Finally, we empirically analyze the FRRS performance for a panel database of 31 provinces (regions) in China during 2017–2022. The evidence reveals that: (i) there is certain individual variation in the global efficiency of FRRS and the corresponding five subsystems during the observed period. The period efficiency of FRSS and subsystems in most provinces shows a fluctuating upward trend, but that of some provinces has been decreasing in recent years; (ii) the regional heterogeneity in FRRS efficiency can be found, which ranges from high to low in the northeastern region, eastern region, central region, and western region; (iii) the development of subsystems and FRRS is not all coordinated, and this incoherence exhibits regional heterogeneity; (iv) the FRRS performance is influenced by a variety of external factors, and their influence is different in terms of direction and magnitude.