Agricultural eco-efficiency and sustainable agricultural development influential factors and heterogeneities: Exclusive evidence from Chinese cities

Agricultural Eco-efficiency improvement is essential to achieve high-quality and sustainable agricultural development. Based on panel data of 126 cities or autonomous prefectures in the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2007 to 2021, under the requirements of high-quality agricultural development in the new era, this study first evaluated the agricultural Eco-efficiency with the super-slack-based measurement (SBM)-undesirable model and then examined the extemporization heterogeneity. Subsequently, the leading influencing factors of spatial heterogeneity in agricultural Eco-efficiency and their interactions were determined with the geographical detector method. The findings indicated that the average agricultural Eco-efficiency value of majority of cities was above 0.6, and the agricultural Eco-efficiency of most cities still had room for improvement. The agricultural Eco-efficiency of the several cities varied significantly. Overall, the middle reaches had higher agricultural Eco-efficiency than the upper and lower reaches. The north had higher agricultural Eco-efficiency than the south. Finally, the spatial heterogeneity in the agricultural Eco-efficiency in the Yangtze River Economic Belt was mainly influenced by the planting structure, farming machinery input intensity and urbanization level, and the interaction among these influencing factors enhanced the spatial heterogeneity. Therefore, it is of great significance to give attention to these influencing factors and regional coordination and cooperation for sustainable agricultural development of the Yangtze River Economic Belt.