E-commerce is not only a new channel through which farmers can sell agricultural products, but also an important engine for transforming agricultural development and modernizing agriculture in the era of the digital economy. Analyzing the adoption of e-commerce from the micro level to improve farmers’ production efficiency has practical value. On the basis of theoretical discussion and analysis and on the survey data of 827 apple farmers in Shaanxi Province, China, we used propensity score matching (PSM) and stepwise regression to test the effects of e-commerce adoption on agricultural production efficiency and the mechanism through which these effects occur. The results showed that e-commerce adoption has a significant positive impact on agricultural production efficiency. The allocation of agricultural factors plays a mediating role in the impact of e-commerce adoption on agricultural production efficiency. Specifically, e-commerce adoption can effectively encourage farmers to rationally allocate agricultural labor, land, and capital production factors, promote the sustainable development of the environment and contribute to creating a harmonious community atmosphere. Therefore, we propose strengthening rural e-commerce support and the publicity and guidance regarding e-commerce adoption by farmers, holding e-commerce training, and promoting the popularization of rural e-commerce to help promote the modernization of agriculture.

Revisiting the effects of relevant factors on Pakistan's agricultural products export | Zaid Ashiq Khan, Mansoor Ahmed Koondhar, Noshaba Aziz, Uzair Ali, Liu Tianjun | Agricultural Journals

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how households’ engagement in concurrent business (CB), which is measured by the contribution of off-farm income to household income, affects the farm size–technical efficiency (TE) relationship in Northern China.Design/methodology/approach: This paper applies a stochastic frontier analysis method to analyze data on 1,006 rural households collected from four major wheat-producing provinces in Northern China, adopting a translog specification for the underlying production function.Findings: The analysis yields three findings. First, the farm size–TE relationship is inverted U-shaped for all CB engagement levels higher than 5 percent, and the most technically efficient farm size increases with the level of household CB engagement. Second, how TE varies with the level of CB engagement depends on farm size: an inverted-U relationship for relatively small farms (20μ). Finally, the overall TE score, 0.88, suggests that wheat output can be increased by 12 percent in Northern China if technical inefficiency were eliminated.Originality/value: Unlike most previous studies that examine the impacts of farm size and households’ off-farm business involvement separately, this paper examines how these two factors interact with each other.