Efficiency of funding to rural revitalization and regional heterogeneity of technologies in China: Dynamic network nonconvex metafrontiers

How to assess the performance of funds to support the rural revitalization is closely concerned by both academics and industries. In this paper, taking agricultural loans and financial allocations as inputs, we open the dynamic internal structure of the funding to support the rural revitalization system (FSRRS), including the agricultural support funds system (ASFS) and the rural revitalization system (RRS). With the consideration of regional heterogeneity, we propose the dynamic network data envelopment analysis (DEA) models based on convex and nonconvex metafrontiers to measure the metatechnology-specific technical efficiency (MTE), group -specific technical efficiency (GTE) and technology gap ratio (TGR) of the overall system and subsystems. The proposed models are empirically applied to assess the efficiency of funding to support rural revitalization and regional heterogeneity of technologies for 31 provinces in China during 2017-2020. The results show that: (i) compared to the nonconvex metafrontier model, its convex counterpart underestimates the efficiency of each decision making unit (DMU), resulting in the unfairness of evaluation, in particular for the central and western regions; (ii) there is a difference in the efficiency of the overall system and the subsystems, where the RRS performance is superior to the ASFS performance, implying that the inefficiency of FSRRS is mainly attributed to the low utilization of agricultural support funds; (iii) the period efficiency of the overall system and subsystems show an increasing trend over time, and the magnitudes of increases are different across provinces (regions); (iv) the TGRs of various provinces (regions) exhibit a significant heterogeneity.