| Abstract | Agricultural technological progress is the core driving force to promote agricultural growth, but the less developed areas are lack of sufficient talents and resources for independent innovation. Therefore, technology diffusion is an important channel through which lagging regions can learn from leading regions in order to achieve convergence and catch-up in agricultural productivity. By expanding the theory of induced technological innovation, this paper analyses the mechanism of how resource endowment, geographical distance, and administrative jurisdiction affect agricultural technology diffusion and productivity convergence through their impacts on the relative price of agricultural inputs. Accordingly, this paper proposes a hypothesis that "technology diffusion and productivity convergence are more likely to occur in areas with similar resources endowment, areas in closer distance, and areas within the same administrative jurisdiction". Based on county-level panel data from 1985 to 2015, this paper innovatively constructs a multi-frontier productivity catching-up model and examines the conditions of agricultural technology diffusion and productivity convergence at different levels: first, same as provincial-level studies in literature, we estimate the rate of technology diffusion and productivity convergence at national level; second, in order to investigate the impact of resource endowment on technology diffusion and productivity convergence, we divide all counties into 10 groups and further into 100 sub-groups, and estimate the speed of within-group technology diffusion and productivity convergence; third, in order to study the influence of geographical distance, this paper analyses and compares technology diffusion and productivity catch-up within different radius ranges; finally, this paper explores technology diffusion and productivity convergence within the same province and the same city, respectively, to evaluate impact of administrative jurisdictions.
The empirical results show that the speed of technology diffusion and productivity convergence is decreasing when: 1) the resource endowment across counties are more different from each other (within resource endowment sub-group ---- within resource endowment group ---- nationwide); 2) the geographical distance across counties are larger (within the radius of 100 kilometers ---- within the radius of 200 kilometers ---- within the radius of 400 kilometers ---- nationwide); and 3) counties not in the same administrative jurisdiction (within the city ---- within the province - nationwide). Therefore, the hypothesis "technology diffusion and productivity convergence are more likely to occur in areas with similar resources endowment, areas in closer distance, and areas within the same administrative jurisdiction" holds. In terms of mechanism analysis, this paper finds evidence that resource endowment, geographical distance and administrative jurisdiction all significantly affect the relative price of land and labor. Based on the theory of induced technological innovation, such impacts leads to difference in relative price, followed by difference in the direction of technological innovation, and therefore cause various growth path of agricultural development, which then results in heterogeneity in the speed of diffusion and convergence. According to the empirical findings, the government should allocate agricultural R&D funding more efficiently, strengthen the construction of transportation and communication facilities, and promote cross-region integration development strategy.
This paper makes four central contributions: 1) the mechanism of how resource endowment, geographical distance and administrative jurisdiction affect the speed of agricultural technology diffusion and productivity convergence is constructed under the framework of induced technological innovation theory; 2) a TFP catch-up model is used instead of the traditional convergence tests, and this model is expanded from a single-frontier model to a multi-frontier model; 3) county-level data, rather than provincial data or farm-level data in literature, are used to overcome the shortcoming of macro and micro data; 4) it not only considers the diffusion and convergence at the national level as in literature, but also verifies that technology diffusion and productivity convergence are more likely to occur in areas with similar resources endowment, areas in closer distance, and areas within the same administrative jurisdiction.
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