Abstract The Chinese national food security strategy has shifted from emphasizing grain output to emphasizing grain production capacity,which requires reforming the formation of agricultural production structure and regional distribution in keeping with regional resource endowment. In this new historical background, whether agricultural policies should stick to regional self-sufficiency or encourage moderately differentiated development based on resource endowment in the future, depends on whether there exist positive or negative spillover effects of agricultural production in each province and the impact of agricultural competition on productivity. However, currently there are two problems in the research on China’s agricultural interprovincial competition and its spatial spillover effects in academia: one is that it is difficult to accurately measure the concept of ″competition″; the other is that it is difficult to extend the influence of competition on the overall or industrial economy to the agricultural field. This article uses a spatial production model to investigate the levels of interprovincial agricultural competition and its impacts on China’s agricultural production from 1995-2015. A model averaging method is adopted to combine the competitions of two dimensions (segment-and region-wide) into multi-dimensional competition. Moreover, an agricultural TFP determination equation is used to estimate the effects of interprovincial competition on agricultural productivity and test time and regional heterogeneityrespectively. There are three central contributions of this article: (1) The bi-dimensional correlation between segment and region has been taken into account to estimate the agricultural productivity more precisely; (2) Multi-dimensional intensity index can be utilized to distinguish the heterogeneity of different competitors; (3) It analyzes the interprovincial agricultural competition from both spillover effects and productivity. The empirical results are as follows: (1) It finds evidences of negative spillover effects due to competition, which may reduce the productivity growth; (2) Agricultural competitions vary greatly among provinces. Traditional agricultural provinces face the most intense competition in agriculture, while ethnic minority or more remote provinces face less intense competition; (3) An agricultural TFP determination equation shows negative impacts on total factor productivity due to competition; (4) Moreover, these negative effects are not only widespread in different regions, but also tend to expand gradually. Therefore, based on the above empirical results, the following two policy implications are put forward: one is to encourage differentiated production of interprovincial agriculture; the other is that against the background of ″rural revitalization″, the government should strengthen the investment intensity in education, the financial support for agriculture and infrastructure, so as to effectively improve the agricultural total factor productivity, ensure a sustainable agricultural growth with high quality and achieve the goal of an ″industrial prosperity″ in agriculture.
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