Local officials play active and important roles in the high-quality agricultural development process in China. In this study, the DEA-SBM model was used to measure the level of agricultural quality development in China, and Tobit regression was conducted to analyze the impacts of officials on agricultural quality development in China. The results showed that between 1997 and 2016, the agricultural GTFP exhibited a downward trend before following an upward trend in China. The personal characteristics of officials had important effects on the development of agricultural quality. In different development stages, officials had diverse effects on agricultural quality development.

PurposeChina's economy has transformed from a high-speed growth phase to a high-quality development phase. The agriculture sector has grown substantially since the economic reform in 1978. Considering the five-year plan (FYP) as a collection of policies, this study explores the relationship between the FYP and agricultural total factor productivity (TFP).Design/methodology/approachThis study uses 31 provincial-level panel data of the five FYPs from 1996 to 2020. The data envelopment analysis (DEA) is used to compute Malmquist productivity indexes. The authors analyze the temporal and spatial changes and convergences of China's agricultural TFP, and investigate the impact of economic planning on China's agricultural TFP and its regional difference.FindingsThere is a slow but upward growth trend in China's agricultural TFP. The technical change has played a leading role in the growth of China's agricultural TFP. The agricultural TFP of all provinces has shown a “catch-up” effect and is developing toward their respective steady-state levels. The regional difference in productivity growth among the eastern, central and western regions exists. Test results show that the FYP has a positive effect on the agricultural TFP, and the effect has obvious regional heterogeneity. The FYP also plays a positive role in the gross value of agricultural output, and the impact effect is greater than that on the improvement of agricultural productivity.Originality/valueThere are many forms of industrial policy in China, among which the FYP is the guiding document of industrial policy, which makes a systematic plan for industrial development in the subsequent five years. The development objectives, guidelines and overall deployment for agriculture in the FYP not only describe the general context of China's agricultural development but also show the key ideas of agricultural development. Therefore, this study explores its impact on agricultural quality development from the perspective of FYP. The results provide evidence for examining the governance performance of the government and the objective evaluation and restraint of the FYP. As agriculture moves toward the stage of high-quality development, the Chinese government should strengthen the critical guiding role of the FYP and pay attention to quality indicators such as technical progress, efficiency improvement and regional coordination in the formulation of the FYP.

S99ObjectiveS: 1-2% of all hospital discharges are designated as a discharge against medical advice (DAMA), and patients with DAMA have poorer outcomes. To our knowledge, there is no prior study that decomposes variation at the level of hospital discharges into patient and non-patient-level factors contributing to DAMA, and we seek to do so in our study. MethOdS: We used the National Inpatient Sample (NIS) 2014, an all-payer healthcare database that provides a stratified sample of 20% of all discharges from US hospitals. We included patients > 18 years, in the general medical group, with known discharge status, and who were not transferred out or did not die in hospital. With our final sample of 2,687,430 discharges, we grouped variables from our data, and ran incremental mixed-effects logit models, with grouping at the level of the discharge, the hospital, and the census region. We obtained the intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), and evaluated the percentage change in ICC. ReSultS: Our preliminary analysis showed associations with DAMA in line with previous studies: younger age, male gender, African-American race, residence in a large metropolis. Of interest, however, is our finding that of the overall variation in DAMA outcomes, 12.8% is associated with the hospital the discharge occurred from, and 1.2% of the variation with the census division the hospital is located in. This decreased with the addition of variables to the models, and the final, fully-adjusted model has 7.3% of variation in DAMA associated with the hospital-level, with the greatest percentage reductions occurring due to the addition of patient demographics. cOncluSiOnS: Our study is the first to explore the percentage in variation in DAMA due to patient, hospital and census-division characteristics. We find that even after adjusting for patient-level characteristics, there is a contribution of non-patient-level factors to DAMA outcomes. PHP76How are we Measuring access to HealtHcare in tHe us? -an environMental scan of Quality Measures