Agricultural Environmental Efficiency and Agricultural Environmental Kuznets Curve Based on Technological Gap: the Case of China

With regards to the interchanging features of agricultural pollution and its negative impacts on China's eco-environment such as environmental degradation, this paper, by fully taking into consideration the gap in environmental technology, incorporated the extended SBM directional distance function and Meta-constraints efficiency function to estimate China's agricultural environmental efficiency (roughly three regions: eastern, central, and western China), and employed the panel model to study the environmental Kuznets curve's (EKC) characteristics and the causes of regional differences in agricultural environmental efficiency under levels of different environmental technology. The study showed that, due to the significant differences in agricultural environmental production technology among the three different regions, agricultural environmental efficiency presented a pattern of progressive decline, for instance; eastern China > western China > central China. Although the agricultural environmental technology of eastern China can reach 96.92% of the potential meta-constraint technology level, agricultural environmental technology of central and western China only reach 83.71% and 79.37% of the potential meta-technology constraint, respectively. The EKC curve of agricultural environmental efficiency was proved to be supportive of the circumstances in China; however, as a result of the gap in environmental technology, the EKC curves of different regions presented different turning points and stages. In addition to agricultural economic growth, openness of trade, proportion of agriculture, agricultural technological level, income gap, and fiscal support to agriculture have a significant effect on agricultural environmental efficiency, but both the impact direction and the impact extent of these factors on agricultural environmental efficiency are different.