| With only 7% of the world’s arable land, China has fed the 22% of the world’s population and let Chinese people live a relatively comfortable life since the inception of reform and open up policy. Nowadays, China is on a way to build a well-off society, but the varietal structural problem is still existing with the tight equilibrium in grain supply and demand. And also, the excessive and improper use of fertilizers, pesticides and agriculture film has serious effects upon the natural resources, especially the soil resource. Recent years, with the agricultural biotechnology continued to make major breakthroughs and rapid industrialization, agricultural competition and development in bio-agriculture is gradually becoming the commanding heights. Governments around the world give areas of top priority to the development of agricultural biotechnology. And bio-agriculture has become a new economic growth point. From this, it is obvious that bio-agriculture now usher in the rare historical opportunity and policy opportunities. Therefore, it is particularly necessary to make an intensive study of bio-agriculture with the accelerated pace of technology diffusion and industrial.As the breakthrough point of technical efficiency and total factor productivity, this paper makes a thorough review of research on the bio-agriculture, and defines the connotation of bio-agriculture features. On the premise of ensuring a focused and forward-looking, this paper makes a deep theoretical analysis and empirical study on the real efficiency and improving path of bio-agriculture in China. Particularly, based on the analysis of bio-agriculture developments and trends at home and abroad, from the perspective of both static and dynamic, this paper analyzes the real situation and the changing tendency of bio-agricultural in China taking listed companies as an example, through the three-stage model of DEA models, Malmquist index model and generalized entropy index model. On the basis of research above, it analyzes the upgrade path and change process of bio-agriculture in China under the efficiency of different combinations and different industries, and reveals the government supervisions and incentives in promoting the development of biological agriculture. The main contents and conclusions are including as follows:(1) The difference between bio-agriculture and traditional agriculture. As the definition of agricultural biotechnology around the world, theory of bio-agriculture is a collection units of production and business activities based on the life sciences and genetics, which are formed by cultivating new varieties of animals and plants and micro-organisms or improving varieties of animals and plants and micro-organisms in the production traits with using genetic engineering, cell engineering, fermentation engineering, enzyme engineering and molecular breeding and biotechnology. According to the different functions, there are five kinds of bio-agriculture:Bio-breeding, biological veterinary medicines and vaccines, bio-pesticides, bio-fertilizers and bio-fed. As emerging industry combining by agricultural biotechnology and agricultural sciences, the differences between agricultural and traditional agriculture are in the following four aspects:Firstly, bio-agriculture is in line with the development of modern agriculture. Secondly, bio-agriculture is a fusion of traditional and modern biotechnology. Thirdly, bio-agriculture is a fusion of functions which include production, ecology and living. Fourth, the intension and extension of bio-agriculture continues to expand.(2) Development tend and situation of bio-agriculture at home and abroad. As traditional agricultural development goes into bottleneck, China is accelerating its pace in agricultural biotechnology industrialization, and the research on plant breeding has changed from conventional breeding into biotechnology breeding. As a result, the research of bio-pesticide developed into "biological information technology" era, the utilization rate of bio fertilizer in the production of agricultural has constantly improved, prevention and control of animal and plant epidemic diseases has been strengthened by biological veterinary medicines and vaccines, and also bio-feed product have been richer. Although China has made some achievements in development of biological agriculture in recent years, there is still a wide gap between China and the world’s advanced level in agricultural biotechnology research, especially the efficiency of technology transfer and industrialization. As the penetration of the multinational seed increasing, biological breeding industry in China is still at a formative stage, and also the genetic engineering vaccine is still the same. Meanwhile, key technologies of bio-feed production rely on imitation and foreign technology, and there are some difficult problems with its application. For these reason, it is an arduous task that biological pesticide replace chemical pesticide.(3) True situation of technical efficiency of Chinese bio-agricultural listed companies. Technical efficiency of Chinese bio-agricultural listed companies can be easily affected by environmental variables such as economic fluctuations, government subsidies and equity structure. Technical efficiency of Chinese agricultural listed companies can be easily affected by environmental variables such as economic fluctuations, government subsidies, and so on. An increase in government subsidies or sustained macroeconomic expansion will increase fixed capital investment redundancy and employee redundancy, and it is against the improvement of the technical efficiency of bio-agricultural listed companies. So, it is good for enhancing the efficiency of bio-technology of agricultural listed companies if the moderate ownership concentration and equity restriction was adopted. Most of the samples show a downward trend in synthesis technology efficiency and scale efficiency if the environment variables and random errors removed. Pure technical efficiency, by contrast, shows an ascending trend. It is also means that, to most of the sample companies, integrated technical inefficiencies mainly comes from the inefficient company size, because the pure technological inefficiency is mainly caused by the poor conditions or the strong random errors. Simultaneously, after excluding the impact of environmental factors and the random errors, most of the sample companies are in the state of increasing return to scale, expansion continues to be a bottleneck of improving technical efficiency. Moreover, there are lots of varied technical efficiency conditions in different types of bio-agricultural listed company. For example, bio-feed, bio-fertilizer companies fare relatively better, while bio-pesticides, bio-breeding, biological veterinary medicines and vaccine companies on the contrary.(4) The real situation of total factor productivity of agricultural listed companies in China. Aside from the effect of environmental variables, it shows a more noticeable increase in total factor productivity of bio-agricultural listed companies in China, and we can notice that the biggest reason of the productivity increasing is the increasing of scale efficiency, the low levels of technological innovation is still the main factor that restricts total factor productivity. Also, aside from the effect of environmental variables, the increasing mode of total factor productivity of agricultural listed companies in China can still be divided into three types, including high-growth, moderate growth and tragic growth, while moderate growth and tragic growth are in the highest flight. However, the increasing of total factor productivity of agricultural listed companies is quite different because of the different types, and the internal diversity of each sub-sector becomes the main reason of the total difference. This means that the development of sub-industry of bio-agriculture listed companies is relatively balanced, but the development of listed companies of sub-industry are intermingled. Moreover, aside from the effect of environmental variables, it shows a significant positive correlation between total factor productivity of agricultural listed companies and factors like total assets of the enterprise, franchise, the degree of research and development investment, asset-liability ratio and executive compensation, while the effect of capital intensity or executive holding shows little negatively correlated.(5) The ways of improving path of Chinese bio-agricultural from the efficiency perspective. According to different combinations of scale efficiency and pure technical efficiency, there are three paths to upgrade the technical efficiency of Chinese bio-agricultural, including groundbreaking breakthrough form, asymptotic form and leap-type. Among them, either expanding production scale or enhancing the level of resource allocation and management is the trend of unit-directional breakthrough form. Making breakthroughs in the area of which has comparative advantages, scale efficiency or technical efficiency, then striving to make up for the other disadvantages is the trend of asymptotic form. As to leap-type, it can be achieved only when agricultural biotechnology reaches a certain level. However, the ways to improve different kinds of biological agriculture is quite different. Key to bio-breeding industry is cultivating improved seeds. Biological veterinary medicines and vaccine industry centers on technology innovation and industrial development. Bio-pesticides industry places great emphasis on devoting to promote the development of product diversification and scale. Bio-feed industry focus on improving products to serve for users to expand market. Bio-fertilizer industry places great emphasis on integrating the various resources. From government supervision and incentive mode, if profit levels of bio-agricultural enterprises which don’t take the production activities standard are significantly higher than those bio-agricultural enterprises which achieve the production activities standard, Or the cost of government supervision is higher, the penalty income is smaller, it is necessary for government to take supervision strategy on biological agricultural enterprises, and shortening the time of government subsidies is conducive to the promotion of a certain agricultural biotechnology as soon as possible for other biological agricultural enterprises, then is conducive to the improvement of social welfare.Based on the theoretical analysis and empirical findings above, this paper proposed some policy suggestions on promoting bio-agricultural development in China from the perspective of government, business, farmers and society. Among them, government should focus on the innovation of government subsidies, strengthen the guidance for different sectors and fostering the development of bio-agriculture industrialization demonstration base, while companies should invest more in technology, innovation, product franchise and establish reasonable equity power balance with shareholder structure with implementing a relatively active debt policy. Moreover, farmers should take initiative to strengthen the use of agricultural means of production to maintain the eco-balance of agricultural environment, while consumers should enhance environmental awareness and participation to make the using of popularization and application of bio-agriculture products become "new normal". |
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