This paper investigates structural variation of agricultural productivity growth in China using a multiple-frontier approach. Agricultural productivity gain in Sichuan province is decomposed into technological progress, technical, mix and scale efficiency changes in terms of economic and environmental performance. The results show that agricultural Luenberger productivity indicator in Sichuan presents a significant increase trend with annual growth rate of 2.5% over the period of 1997-2017. The agricultural green growth in Sichuan is most driven by technological progress. Of the decline in the OI changes, over 90% results from the decline of environmental inefficiency. The technological progress is the main driven force of the economic growth while the TEC (technical inefficiency) incumbers its growth. The structural effects (mix and scale components) incumber environmental growth. The results imply that policymakers should pay more attention to new agricultural technological development and resource misallocation to improve agricultural green growth in Sichuan.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) initiated by Chinese government could be regarded as a systematic framework for promoting economic cooperation and development among the countries along the Belt and Road and China. This paper attempts to analyze economic and environmental performance in 61 developing countries along Belt and Road. An additive total factor productivity growth measure allows aggregating contributions of individual countries along the BRI to construct a reasonable measure. Both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered. The growth in the total factor productivity is decomposed with respect to the economic and environmental contributions. The annual average growth rate of green productivity is 3.1% and the disparity of economic and environmental performance could be observed among countries. Some countries show robust economic growths while environmental performance slows down green growth. This indicates that developing economies should pay attention to environmental impacts and promote sustainable development by sharing emission reduction technologies.

The integration of economies always attracts much attention from policymakers and researchers. This paper introduces a novel approach to evaluate potential economic and environmental gains from integrating economies. Based on aggregate production technology and directional distance functions, we regard all decision-making units as a whole, allowing free resource reallocation among units. The level of resource misallocation is identified by a structural measure, which is obtained by the difference between overall potential improvement and individual technical inefficiency. Taking China as an empirical example, possible economic output expansions are estimated at 43.2% and 10.1% under convex and nonconvex production technologies, respectively; potential pollution reductions are around 28.4% and 5.1% under convex and nonconvex production technologies, respectively. A significant disparity of structural inefficiencies is detected, indicating a high level of resource misallocation in China. Economic cooperation is vital to promote potential green gains for all provinces in China.