Inter-provincial differences of technical innovation efficiency among farmer professional cooperatives in China

The technical innovation efficiency of farmer professional cooperatives has a far-reaching impact on the economic transformation and development in rural China, but it has been rarely studied. Addressing this gap, this article builds an index evaluating system for the technical innovation efficiency of provinces through a three-stage data envelopment analysis model that measures the relative efficiency of the technical innovation of cooperatives in China's thirty-one provinces. The results show that the Eastern and Central provinces in China are more efficient than the Western provinces in terms of the technical innovation efficiency of farmer professional cooperatives. However, due to the lack of sustainable innovative capability of these cooperatives, investment redundancy is common in technical innovation. Besides, the impact of the external technology environment on the technical innovation of provincial farmer professional cooperatives is significant, and the scale of the rural market greatly incentivizes the cooperative technical innovation. Some policy suggestions are accordingly proposed.