Production and productivity growth in Chinese agriculture: New national and regional measures

This article aims to measure national and regional growth in output, input, and total factor productivity (TFP) in Chinese agriculture and to reassess the impact of the recent policy reforms on production, productivity growth, and regional inequality. The next section will review some aggregation issues in production theory and show how estimates of aggregate output and input and, therefore, measured TFP can be biased as a result of using constant prices as weights. Section III is devoted to the measurement of growth in output, input, and productivity and to regional inequality in Chinese agriculture. Section IV presents our conclusions.