Abstract:

Since the reform and openingup in 1978,institutional innovation and technological progress have promoted the development of agricultural economy.However,due to the “threehigh (high energy consumption,high investment,and high waste)” mode of agricultural production,great achievements in agricultural development were largely at the expense of the ecological environment.Agricultural development and environmental protection have become an increasingly prominent conflict.Therefore,it is an important and urgent task to solve the contradiction among agricultural development,resource utilization and ecological environment protection.Following Islam,this paper developed a theoretical model to decompose the relationship between economic development and agricultural nonpoint source pollution.Using provincial level panel data from year 1990 to 2010,this paper investigated the driving mechanisms of the evolution of agricultural nonpoint source pollution in order to provide the theoretical basis for the control and management of agricultural nonpoint source pollution.The main conclusions are as follows.(1) The evolution of agricultural nonpoint source pollution was simultaneously influenced by the scale effect,the structure effect and the abatement effect.The scale effect was the effect of the scale of agricultural economic activity on agricultural nonpoint source pollution.Economic production consumed natural resources and produced waste,and therefore had a negative impact on the environment.The structure effect reflected the effect of the share of different industrial output on agricultural nonpoint source pollution.In different industries,factor inputs and production processes were different.Therefore,different industrial output had different impact on the environment.The abatement effect reflected the effect of the demand for environmental quality and the increase of environmental investment due to the increase of the level of economic development,technological progress,and the reform of agricultural environmental management system on agricultural nonpoint source pollution.(2) Empirical results show that the scale effect positively affected agricultural nonpoint source pollution,indicating that the expansion of the scale of agricultural production and rural population increased agricultural nonpoint source pollution.The two important aspects of the structure effect,i.e.the rise of the proportion of cash crop as well as the production value of livestock and poultry,increased agricultural nonpoint source pollution as well.The abatement effect due to technological progress and economic development started to play a role in effectively reducing agricultural nonpoint source pollution.This made the coordinated development between agricultural production and ecological environment possible