Provincial Technology and Productivity Gaps in China Using Meta-Frontier

This study intends to analyze not only technical efficiency and technology gap but also productivity change and productivity gap in thirty one provinces in three regions of China for 1995 through 2008 adapting meta-frontier model. Also, we decompose the productivity into technical progress change and technical efficiency change in order to check a main component to the changes. We found that the group technical efficiency (or productivity) and meta-technical efficiency (or productivity) of provinces are different from each other. With respect to the meta-frontier, the eastern region shows the highest levels in terms of productivity as well as technical efficiency. Regarding the meta-productivity change, the productivity declines in the central and western regions have been mainly led by the drop on the efficiency change while the productivity growth in the eastern region has been driven by the technical progress. Lastly, by applying the meta-frontier, we found a very important fact that there exists a difference between the group-frontiers and the meta-frontiers, which implies that we may give wrong information and distort a reality with the group-frontier when measuring the technical efficiencies or productivity changes.