Despite achieving remarkable development, China’s agricultural economy has been under severe environmental pressure. Based on previous studies, the present study further considers the sources of agricultural carbon emissions in depth, estimates China’s agricultural carbon emissions from 1997 to 2016, and analyzes the agricultural pollution faced by China and its provinces. The study estimates the amount and intensity of agricultural carbon emissions in China from five carbon sources—agricultural materials, rice planting, soil N₂O, livestock and poultry farming, and straw burning—and analyzes their spatial and temporal characteristics. The following results were obtained: (1) between 1997 and 2016, the amount of agricultural carbon emissions in China generally increased, while the intensity of agricultural carbon emissions decreased; (2) in the same period, the amount of carbon emissions from each category of carbon source generally increased, with the exception of rice planting; however, the amount of emissions fluctuated; (3) the amount and intensity of carbon emissions varied greatly among provinces; (4) the emissions from different categories of carbon source showed different concentration trends and agglomeration forms; (5) China’s agricultural carbon emissions showed obvious spatial correlation, which overall was high–high agglomeration; however, its carbon emissions gradually weakened, and the spatial agglomeration of agricultural carbon emissions in each province changed between 1997 and 2016.

Environmental costs should be taken into account when measuring the achievements of China’s agricultural development, since the long-term extensive development of agriculture has caused huge environmental pollution. This study took agricultural carbon emissions as an undesired output to estimate the agricultural development efficiency in 31 provinces of China from 1998 to 2016, based on the green total factor productivity, as assessed by the slacks-based measure directional distance function and constructing the global Malmquist–Luenberger index. We measured agricultural carbon emissions in terms of five aspects: agricultural materials, rice planting, soil, livestock and poultry farming, and straw burning, and then compared the green total factor productivity index and the total factor productivity index. The study came to the following conclusions: (1) the green technology efficiency change was smaller than the technology efficiency change at first, but the gap between them is narrowing with time, such that the former is now larger than the latter; (2) the green technology efficiency was in a declining state and the green technology progress was increasing, promoting the green total factor productivity growth, from 1998 to 2016; and (3) China’s agricultural green total factor productivity increased by 4.2% annually in the east, 3.4% annually in the central region, and 2.5% annually in the west.

Promoting equal access to public services and improving people's well-being is a key link in building a modern national governance system in China. However, under the Chinese-style fiscal decentralization system, local governments face the “dilemma” of economic growth goals and the improvement of people's livelihoods. China's basic public services still have the problems of insufficient supply quantity, unbalanced structure and low efficiency. This paper aims to explore the impact of fiscal decentralization and local government competition on basic public services, and provide a theoretical and practical basis for deepening the reform of China's fiscal and taxation system, perfecting the transfer payment system, and improving the public service provision at the present stage. Under the premise of theoretical hypothesis, based on the panel data of 178 prefecture-level cities in China from 2008 to 2019, which is obtained from the Statistical Yearbook and the Work report of prefecture-level governments, the fixed effect model and threshold model are used for the empirical test. The results show that: first, the increase of fiscal decentralization has a negative impact on supply of basic public services in prefecture-level cities; second, the local government competition aiming at economic growth will intensify the negative impact, and make the relationship between fiscal decentralization and basic public services show nonlinear characteristics; Third, compared with developed areas, the strengthening regulatory effect of local government competition is more obvious in less-developed areas, such as western and northeastern regions, and third-tier, fourth-tier, and fifth-tier cities. Based on these findings, this paper draws the following policy implications: strengthen the reform of the fiscal and taxation system below the provincial level, promote the construction of a direct transfer payment mechanism, adjust the standards and methods of performance appraisal, and use modern information technology to improve the public service demand and interest expression mechanisms.

Chronic diseases among the elderly and their huge economic burden on family have caught much attention from economists and sociologists over the past decade in China. This study measured the economic burden of elderly chronic disease (ECD) in families using the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) data set from Peking University (China). We studied some aspects of this burden, including health-service utilization, out-of-pocket expenditure on inpatient and outpatient, total family expenditures on items, and labor force participation rates of family members, etc. Some interesting things were found, for example, the additional annual expenditure on inpatient care (per member) in ECD-families was 37 to 45 percent of the annual expenditure in the control group; the labor-force participation rate in ECD-families was 2.4 to 3.3 percent of points lower than in the control group.

This paper investigates the temporal trend and regional disparity of China’s agricultural green total factor productivity (AGTFP) during 1997‐2016. Combined with the green Luenberger productivity indicator, two different data envelopment analysis models with the biennial environmental technology are constructed for robust checks. Compared with the existing literature, more agricultural carbon emissions are used as the undesirable outputs in the models. It is found that AGTFP in the whole of China and all of its sub‐regions (the east, the middle, and the west) showed an overall increase, with the drive of high technical progress. The east had the largest AGTFP, and the middle experienced the largest AGTFP growth. More specifically, with respect to AGTFP, the total difference and the gross difference among the three regions as well as the specific difference within regions widened during these periods. There was an absolute convergence trend of AGTFP in the whole of China as well as the middle and the west. The speed of convergence was highest in the west.

China’s agriculture has struggled over the past century to produce more food to feed the country’s expanding population while also contending with high-intensity pollution. In order to support China’s transition to low-carbon agriculture more efficiently, it is important to improve the efficiency of agricultural carbon emissions. This study employs the biennial weight modified Russell model to investigate China’s agricultural total factor carbon efficiency (ATFCE) during 1999–2018 and its differences between the three agricultural functional zones (AFZs), including the grain-producing zone (GPZ), the grain balance zone (GBZ), and the main grain-selling zone (GSZ). The study found that the ATFCE in China was 0.761, a high value. GSZ (0.9865) had the highest ATFCE, followed by GBZ (0.7201) and GPZ (0.6666). ATFCE in China fell by approximately 25%, from 0.825 in 1999 to 0.6983 in 2018. Further, the provinces with the highest ATFCE included Tibet (0.9997), Hainan (0.9981), Shanghai (0.997), Beijing (0.9937), and Jiangsu (0.9924). Provinces with the lowest ATFCEs included Hubei (0.4743), Yunnan (0.4645), Hunan (0.441), Anhui (0.4295), Heilongjiang (0.4130), and Jiangxi (0.3354). In addition, the difference in ATFCE within the whole of China, GPZ, and GBZ generally widened during 1999–2018. There was a rise in all three inequalities between the three AFZs. The difference between GPZ and GBZ was the greatest among the three interregional differences. Finally, the difference between subregions was the largest source of the total difference (43.66%), followed by the difference within subregions (30.04%) and the intensity of transvariation (25.94%).