The inter-provincial disparity in China's agricultural labor productivity

This paper examines the evolution of inter-provincial disparity in China's agricultural productivity by using the convergence test, and investigates the factors which affect the disparity by employing the regression-based disparity decomposition approach. The convergence test finds that there is no existence of absolute convergence but merely conditional convergence for China's agricultural labor productivity over the period 1986-2005. The decomposition results indicate that production input is the dominant factor for both the inter-provincial disparity itself and the increase in it in China's agricultural labor productivity, and the total factor productivity also plays the important role. Among the input factors, intermediate input makes the major contribution to enlarging disparity, and farmland plays a remarkable role of deceleration for the increase in disparity, while the total factor productivity plays a significant role of acceleration.