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Influencing Factors and Improvement Suggestions for Agricultural Green Development Performance: Empirical Insights from China

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Abstract

Agricultural green development is an essential direction for global sustainable agriculture. The academic literature, however, needs to place greater emphasis on studying the factors influencing agricultural green development performance and how such performance can be improved. A theoretical framework for agricultural green development performance was constructed in this paper using the Super-SBM model, which considers undesirable outputs, to measure the agricultural green development performance of 330 cities at or above the prefecture level in China (excluding Tibet Autonomous Region, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan of China) from 2007 to 2018. Furthermore, the influencing mechanism of agricultural green development performance was then analyzed using a spatial econometric model. The results show that: 1) from 2007 to 2018, China’s agricultural green development performance experienced three stages of evolution: ‘rise, decline and rise’. 2) The regions with high performance agricultural green development are mainly distributed in eastern China, northeastern China, and southern Qinghai Province. 3) The agricultural economic level, industrialization process, and labor quality play significant roles in promoting local agricultural green development performance, while such performance is obviously inhibited by the openness level and the government’s environmental regulations. Local agricultural green development performance is significant inhibited by the agricultural economic level and accelerated industrialization process in neighboring cities, while significantly promoted by the agricultural industrial structure in neighboring cities. Some suggestions for improving agricultural green development performance are proposed based on these research results, which can provide scientific references for promoting sustainable agriculture.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Research Institute of Yellow River Civilization and Sustainable Development & Collaborative Innovation Center on Yellow River Civilization of Henan Province, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475001, China

    Erling Li

  2. Key Laboratory of Geospatial Technology for the Middle and Lower Yellow River Regions/The College of Geography and Environmental Science, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475001, China

    Erling Li, Mengzhen Zhang, Ruolan Li & Qingqing Deng

  3. Institute of Sustainable Development in Agriculture and Rural Area, Henan University, Kaifeng, 475004, China

    Erling Li

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  1. Erling Li
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  2. Mengzhen Zhang
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  3. Ruolan Li
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  4. Qingqing Deng
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Contributions

LI Erling: conceptualization, designing the analytical framework, writing-original draft preparation, writing-review and editing, supervision, coordinating the research team; ZHANG Mengzhen: methodology, performing the statistical analysis, writing-original draft preparation; LI Ruolan: investigation, data curation, software; DENG Qingqing: visualization, validation, writing-original draft preparation, writing-review and editing.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qingqing Deng.

Ethics declarations

LI Erling is an editorial board member of Chinese Geographical Science. She was not involved in the peer-review or handling of the manuscript. The authors have no other competing interests to disclose.

Additional information

Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41971222, 42001190), Key R&D (Science and Technology) and Promotion Project of Henan Province (No. 222102110420), Key Research Project of Higher Education Think Tank in Henan Province (No. 2022ZKYJ06)

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Li, E., Zhang, M., Li, R. et al. Influencing Factors and Improvement Suggestions for Agricultural Green Development Performance: Empirical Insights from China. Chin. Geogr. Sci. 33, 917–933 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-023-1385-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-023-1385-6

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