Evolution of green total factor productivity and regional disparity in China's husbandry

Green total factor productivity (TFP) is a key indicator for measuring the transformation mode of economic development. The promotion of green TFP has been particularly important for achieving high-quality development of animal husbandry. Existing literatures on green TFP have ignored inter-regional heterogeneity. The productivity index has been usually measured based on distance functions of evaluated unit (province) own leading to results not inter-comparable among units. consequently failure in providing accurate policy advice for decision makers. This paper proposed a novel approach of allocating the contributions of economic gain and environmental improvement to green TFP growth of every evaluated unit. Based on the concept, the main contribution was based on a robust aggregate directional distance function and aggregate Luenberger productivity indicators. We set a unified direction for all over China to measure green TFP evolution of animal husbandry in 31 provinces for the period 2001-2016. The results showed that:1) generally, the average annual growth rate of green TFP in China's animal husbandry was 5.01%; of which the contribution rate of economic efficiency was 88.83% and that of technological progress as high as 78.65%. 2) There were regional imbalances in the development of animal husbandry industry across provinces, with eastern and central regions having faster growth than western areas. 3) There was potential of improvement in green TFP growth of animal husbandry in China with bigger room for improvement of environment efficiency than economic efficiency. Different directions of the improvement of green TFP growth of animal husbandry existed among the eastern, central and western regions of China. For the eastern regions, economy growth and carbon emission was in weak decoupling with small improvement room of TFP growth. For the central regions, both economic and environment efficiencies had great improvement room. And the western region had certain potential in economic efficiency enhancement and carbon emission reduction. Thus in order to realize high-quality development of animal husbandry, there was need to accelerate the transformation from relying on increasing the input of factors to environmental improvement for increasing green TFP of animal husbandry, and to strengthen the innovation of green science and technology. Also to realize balanced development of animal husbandry, it was necessary to break the police obstacles between urban and rural areas, and among regions, and increase per capita animal husbandry output value.