Research on High-Quality Development Efficiency and Total Factor Productivity of Regional Economies in China

Abstract

Different from the developmental mode of western developed countries, China’s economy has changed from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development, where the people’s growing needs for better lives can be met, embodying this new concept of development. The aim of our study is to evaluate the high-quality development efficiency and total factor productivity (TFP) of regional economies in China, and to explore the characteristics of spatial-temporal pattern evolution and their influencing factors. By using the slacks-based measure of directional distance functions (SBM-DDF) model, based on the undesirable output perspective, the high-quality development efficiency and TFP of regional economies in China, from 2000 to 2018, are evaluated in this paper. The exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) and Tobit models are then used to identify the spatial-temporal correlation patterns and influencing factors of high-quality development efficiency and TFP. The key results show the following: (1) from 2001 to 2018, the greatest high-quality development efficiency and TFP belonged to China’s eastern region and the least to its central region. (2) U and inverted-U trend lines show that high-quality development efficiency has significant regional difference in the east–west direction, presenting a significant feature of spatial imbalance. (3) Government, urbanization rate, and marketization level play a positive role in their impact of TFP, whereas financial development, infrastructure, foreign direct investment, and capital labor ratio play a negative one.

Realizing the Improvement of Green Total Factor Productivity of the Marine Economy—New Evidence from China’s Coastal Areas

“…Only the proportion of the output value for marine fishery and marine shipping industries was greater than 50%. The proportion of marine biological medicine and the comprehensive utilization of seawater, marine power generation, and other industries to GOP was less than 1% [ 9 ]. In 2012, there were 17 marine scientific research institutions, ranking fourth place; 865 R&D workers, ranking sixth place; CNY 3.96628 million of internal expenditure on R&D, ranking sixth place; and 205 R&D projects, ranking eighth place.…”

“…The high-quality development of the marine economy emphasizes the dynamic balance of the “economy–society–ecological environment” system [ 8 ]. To achieve this, continuously improving the total factor productivity (TFP) of the marine economy is the key or even the only way [ 9 , 10 ]. From the report of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, it can also be seen that the core approach to China’s economy from high-speed growth to high-quality development is to change from the unsustainable old driving force relying on the expansion of factor input to the sustainable new driving force mainly relying on TFP.…”

High-Quality Development of Chinese Agriculture under Factor Misallocation

“…Considering the availability of data, some indicators have been appropriately abandoned during the construction of the indicator system, although they may have an impact on the high-quality development of agriculture. How to measure high-quality development is the key of this paper; the new development concept (innovation, coordination, green, openness, and sharing) proposed by the Fifth Plenum of the 18th Central Committee Communist Party of China is regarded as an effective criterion for evaluating high-quality development, and is generally recognized by the academic community [ 49 , 50 ]. Therefore, on the basis of an in-depth understanding of new development concepts and combining the existing achievements [ 22 , 24 , 25 , 49 , 50 ], this paper evaluates the high-quality development of agriculture from five dimensions of “innovation level, coordination level, green level, openness level, and sharing level”, and the specific indicators are shown in Table 1 .…”

The Impact of Environmental Regulation, Industrial Structure, and Interaction on the High-Quality Development Efficiency of the Yellow River Basin in China from the Perspective of the Threshold Effect

“…At present, research on high-quality development efficiency generally focuses on the high-quality development efficiency of industries, industries, and resource utilization, such as the high-quality development efficiency of manufacturing, high-quality development efficiency of commercial banks [ 11 ], and high-quality efficiency of rural land use [ 12 ]. For the high-quality and efficient development of the region, it focuses on a specific aspect of development, such as the high-quality economic development efficiency [ 13 , 14 ] and the high-quality development efficiency of the urban environment [ 15 ]. A limited number of pieces of literature discuss the high-quality development efficiency of cities and economic belts [ 3 , 16 , 17 ].…”