| Since the reform and opening up,China's agricultural production has generally shown a rapid growth trend,providing a solid material foundation for the smooth progress of industrialization and the continuous advancement of urbanization.However,due to the significant differences in development levels,resource endowment conditions,and geographical environment among regions,the unbalanced characteristics of labor productivity among regions are still obvious.According to estimates by Wang Yahui and others,agricultural labor productivity in eastern China in 2013 was 1.62 times and 1.81 times that of central and western regions,respectively.From the perspective of the structure of farmers' income sources,family business income is the main source of farmers' income in the central and western regions,and low labor productivity has become a bottleneck restricting the increase of their operating income.Therefore,the long-term persistence of regional differences in labor productivity is bound to exacerbate farmers' income Inequality.According to data released by the National Development and Reform Commission: From the perspective of per capita disposable income of rural residents,the gap between high and low income groups has increased from 6.47 times(2000)to 8.65 times(2014).Given that the shortcoming of a well-off society is whether poor farmers can increase their income,the widening income gap among farmers will inevitably affect the achievement of this goal.Therefore,exploring the dynamic evolution of labor productivity regional differences in China's plantation industry and its formation mechanism is of great practical significance for promoting balanced growth of farmers' incomes between regions and even achieving the grand goal of building a well-off society in an all-round way.By reviewing relevant literature in academia,it is found that most studies have focused on the regional differences,trends,and influencing factors.However,the complex evolution process of regional differences has not been analyzed in depth,and it is impossible to explain the formation mechanism.This analysis evaluates the dynamic evolution mechanism of regional difference using the dataset for 31 provincial regions in China over the period 2000-2017.Based onnon-parametric estimation method,labor productivity growth of planting industry is decomposed into five components including technical efficiency,technological progress,the substitution effect of capital to labor,the substitution effect of land to labor and output structure effect.Then,using the counterfactual analysis method to construct a virtual distribution of labor productivity under the influence of single factor and multiple factors,this paper explores the dynamic evolution of labor productivity regional differences in plantation and its formation mechanism.The results indicate that:(1)The labor productivity of China's plantation industry has significant differences at the provincial and regional levels.From the perspective of dynamic evolution,the regional differences in labor productivity of planting industry present an obvious upward trend during the whole studied period.From the perspective of dividing time periods,it experiences an alternate change process from “expanding” to“narrowing”.(2)Technological progress contributes to divergence in the first phase.Subsequently,the improvement of technical efficiency and the optimization of output structure jointly shrink this gap.Afterward,the adjustment of the output structure leads to the expansion of the regional disparity.Recently,due to the optimization of land-labor ratio and output structure,the regional gap becomes narrower.The policy implications contained in the above research conclusions are to enhance agricultural technological innovation capabilities,improve agricultural mechanization,improve subsidies for crop varieties,and moderately promote the transfer of agricultural land management rights. |
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