Receiving Robust Analysis of Spatial and Temporary Variation of Agricultural Water Use Efficiency While Considering Environmental Factors: On the Evaluation of Data Envelopment Analysis Technique

Abstract

With accelerated urbanisation, continued growth in water demand and the external pressure of water demand from the South–North Water Transfer Project, agricultural water use in Jiangsu is facing a critical situation. Therefore, it is important to explore the spatial and temporal variation in agricultural water use efficiency in order to clarify the pathway for improving agricultural water use efficiency. Firstly, the Super-Slacks-Based Measure (SBM) model was utilized to measure agricultural water use efficiency in Jiangsu Province, China, from 2011 to 2020, and secondly, a fixed-effects model was used to investigate agricultural water use efficiency and the factors influencing it in 13 prefectures in Jiangsu Province in both time and space. The results show that (1) the overall value of agricultural water use efficiency in Jiangsu Province is below 1, which means that agricultural water use efficiency in Jiangsu Province is low and far from the effective boundary, and there is more room for improvement in agricultural water use efficiency; (2) a total of 92% of prefectures in Jiangsu Province have input redundancy, which seriously inhibits the progress of agricultural water use efficiency in Jiangsu Province, among which the redundancy of total agricultural machinery power and agricultural water use is the highest; (3) Regarding total factor productivity and its decomposition index for agricultural use in Jiangsu Province, in the time dimension, the number of professional and technical personnel inputs has a positive impact on agricultural water use efficiency. In the spatial dimension, the number of professional and technical personnel inputs, industrial structure and arable land area have a positive impact on improving regional agricultural water use efficiency, among which the industrial structure has a smaller contribution to agricultural water use efficiency.

Evaluation of Agricultural Water Resources Allocation Efficiency and Its Influencing Factors in the Yellow River Basin

“…The DEA model is the most widely used method, and based on it, multiple methods like the DEA-BCC model [8], super-efficiency DEA model [9] and super-efficiency SBM model [10] are developed and are further combined with the Malmquist index and Tobit regression [11]. For example, relevant studies on the efficiency of agricultural water resources utilization using the above approaches have been carried out in different basins or regions, such as the Yangtze River basin [12], the Yellow River Basin [13], Tumen River Basin [14], Hubei [15], Gansu [16], Shaanxi [17], Shandong [18] and Jiangsu Province [19] in China. Although there are already many relatively comprehensive studies on the efficiency of agricultural water resources utilization, there are still some deficiencies: (1) the existing studies always focus on the use efficiency of agricultural water resources in fixed areas, but they ignore the similarities and differences between different regions; (2) the traditional DEA model is often used, and the unexpected output in the input process is often omitted, thus affecting the accuracy of efficiency.…”