Impact of Agricultural Industrial Agglomeration on Agricultural Environmental Efficiency in China: A Spatial Econometric Analysis

Abstract

In recent years, China has made remarkable progress in increasing yield at the expense of resource depletion, excessive consumption, and overexploitation. Improving agricultural environmental efficiency (AEE) is crucial to achieve agricultural modernization and facilitate a green transformation. Agricultural industrial agglomeration (AIA), as a main policy in industrial space organization, is an effective way to promote resource allocation optimization. This paper selects panel data of 31 provinces in China from 2000 to 2020 and employs the fixed-effects stochastic frontier analysis with hyperbolic distance function to measure AEE. Based on this, an empirical analysis is conducted to investigate the impact of AIA on AEE. The study finds that the average value of AEE is 0.909, which needs to be further improved. Meanwhile, AEE demonstrates obvious agglomeration characteristics and positive correlations with space. AIA exerts an inverted U-shaped effect on AEE in local and neighboring regions. Therefore, this paper believes that to improve AEE, it is essential to carry out dynamic and differentiated strategies of industrial agglomeration, ensuring the level of AIA remains within a reasonable range and effectively eliminates the congestion effect.