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Purpose Fertilizer overuse is regarded as one of the main contributors to agricultural pollution and environmental problems in China. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate technical efficiency (TE) and fertilizer overuse index (FOI) with respect to China’s arable agricultural production and examine regional variations in terms of fertilizer overuse. Design/methodology/approach The maximum likelihood random effects–time varying inefficiency effects model was applied to estimate TE, fertilizer use efficiency (FUE) and FOI. Findings Over the study period (2011–2015), TE steadily increased for each individual province. Overall, mean annual TE was 0.811, implying that, on average, Chinese provinces could increase output by 18.9 per cent given unchanged levels of inputs and technology. Mean annual FOI ranged from 0.008 to 3.139, with a mean of 0.685, suggesting that there is fertilizer overuse in almost all provinces, and that large regional variation exists. Coastal provinces were found to have the highest TE scores, while the central region showed the highest degree of fertilizer overuse. Originality/value The results indicate that fertilizer use has had a significant positive impact on production in the China’s arable agricultural sector. High TE was not necessarily associated with low FUE.

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Although the role of farmer cooperatives as a social unit can have impact on their performance, empirical analysis on how societal output and social value relevant variables affect the cooperatives performance is sparse. The objective of this paper is to provide an economic framework and operational model for performance measurement of farmer cooperative associated with societal impact. A multi-output translog production function considering social output represented by the number of beneficiary farmers using data from surveys 164 cooperatives in Fujian province, China, is estimated. The average technical efficiency of cooperatives is estimated to be 0.747, implying that cooperatives can be increased by 25.30% without any additional resources given the current production input level. It is interesting to find that cooperatives' efficiency scores and their rankings are significantly different with and without taking societal output into account, which indicates that social output created by the number of beneficial farmers' cannot be ignored when evaluating cooperative's performance. The societal value relevant variables for technical inefficiency factors represented by extent of providing members' service, namely training members and selling products are also found negatively affecting technical efficiency of cooperatives. The findings indicate the evaluation of cooperatives performance should consider their non-economic social contribution.

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