An Empirical Study of the Relationship between Agriculture Environmental Efficiency and Economic Growth

Abstract

According to environmental Kuznets hypothesis, inverted “U” relationship exists between environmental quality and economic development. Along with economic growth, environmental quality will be presented a trend that first gets worsening and then gets improved [1]. The agricultural environment efficiency will be presented a trend that first decreases and then increases along with agricultural nonpoint source pollution changes at different stages of economic development [2]. In order to verify whether such relationship exists in various provinces of China’s agricultural production, this paper is based on accounting for agriculture pollution emissions per province of China, and calculates the agriculture environmental efficiency in various provinces of China of 20 years in 1992-2011 based on SBM model. On this basis, further study on the relationship between the agriculture environmental efficiency and economic growth has been done. The result shows that causal relationship exists between agriculture environmental efficiency and China’s economic growth, and the curve between agriculture environmental efficiency and economic growth is showing “U” shape, indirectly verified the EKC hypothesis.