Abstract:  

In order to achieve the sustainability of agricultural water resource and assure national food security, it is imperative to improve the regional agricultural water efficiency(AWE). In this study, we measure the AWE of 31 Chinese provinces(municipalities, autonomous regions) for the years 1998 to 2015 based on SBM model which considers both undesirable outputs and metafrontier technology simultaneously. Subsequently, taking the factors such as the bearing capacity of agricultural resources, environmental capacity, ecological type and development foundation into account, we divide the sample into three groups: prioritizeddevelopment zone, moderatedevelopment zone, protecteddevelopment zone. Then the regional differences, evolution trend and improvement potential are empirical studied, respectively. The results showed that the average values of AWE with reference to metafrontier of protecteddevelopment zone, prioritizeddevelopment zone and moderatedevelopment zone are 0.632, 0.568 and 0.432. The finding showed that if the potential optimal production technology was adopted, the three major regions would have a large room for efficiency improvement of 37.7%, 43.2% and 56.8%, respectively, indicating the potential for improvement would be huge. Technology and management ineffectiveness were the two major sources of regional AWE loss. The efficiency loss of the prioritizeddevelopment area is mainly caused by the ineffective management, showing that improving both the management system and the management level are of significance strategies to promote the regional AWE. The loss of efficiencies in protecteddevelopment zone and moderatedevelopment zone are mainly resulted from the low level of agricultural water production technology and the ineffective management. Thus, it was necessary to combine the technical and management improvement strategy to improve the efficiency.