Spatiotemporal characteristics analysis of the potato production efficiency in China based on the DEA-ESDA model

Based on the input-output data of China’s main potato producing provinces from 2011 to 2018, and applying the DEA-Malmquist index model and the exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) method, this paper quantitatively studied the temporal and spatial characteristics of the potato production efficiency in China. Results show that: 1) the comprehensive technical efficiency, the pure technical efficiency and the scale efficiency of China’s potato production from 2011 to 2018 were all DEA ineffective, and the comprehensive technical efficiency was mainly restricted by the scale efficiency of input factors; 2) among all the study provinces, only the total factor productivities of Inner Mongolia, Shandong, Liaoning, Hubei, and Sichuan were growing positively, while the total factor productivities of the rest of the provinces were declining. Technological progress was the biggest obstacle to the increase of the total factor productivity of China’s potato production; 3) among these main potato producing regions, the southwest advantage area had the highest comprehensive technical efficiency, the north China advantage area and the northwest advantage area had higher pure technical efficiency, and the northeast advantage area and the southwest advantage area had higher scale efficiency; and 4) the comprehensive technical efficiency of potato production in China had significant positive spatial correlations among Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Shaanxi Province, Gansu Province and Sichuan Province, which were clustered in the form of “H-H” with strong radiating and driving capacity for regional production efficiency. The next step should focus on optimizing the structure of China’s potato production input factors, breaking the bottleneck of comprehensive technical efficiency improvement, and formulating potato production efficiency improvement policies based on the characteristics of potato production efficiency in different regions, and further exerting the efficiency of advantageous provinces to improve the spread effects.