Agric. Econ. - Czech, 2025, 71(8):445-457 | DOI: 10.17221/411/2024-AGRICECON

Efficiency of agricultural and pastoral systems in China considering shared factors and undesirable outputsOriginal Paper

Chunhua Chen¹, Chongyu Ma²

¹ College of Economics and Management, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, Hohhot, P.R. China

² Transportation Institute, Inner Mongolia University, Hohhot, P.R. China

Assessing and optimising the efficiency of agricultural and pastoral systems is crucial for the long-term development of a country. The presence of shared factors and undesirable outputs increases the complexity of evaluating the efficiency of these systems. To address this issue, we first analysed the production possibility sets of the agricultural subsystems, pastoral subsystems, and agricultural and pastoral systems. Then, two bounded adjusted measure (BAM) models considering shared factors and undesirable outputs were proposed to evaluate the divisional efficiency of agricultural and pastoral subsystems. Additionally, a network BAM model in the presence of shared factors and undesirable outputs was developed to assess overall efficiency. Undesirable outputs were handled by slack-based measures in the three novel models. The proposed models were used to evaluate the efficiency of agricultural and pastoral systems across 30 provinces and cities in China. To explore the impact of undesirable outputs, the efficiency of ignoring undesirable outputs was investigated and compared with that obtained from the new method. These results suggest that ignoring undesirable outputs may misestimate efficiency to a certain extent.

Keywords: agriculture; bounded adjusted measure; data envelopment analysis; shared factors; undesirable outputs

Received: October 28, 2024; Revised: April 10, 2025; Accepted: May 20, 2025; Published: August 31, 2025  Show citation