China’s Agricultural Green Transition and High-Quality Development Toward Carbon Neutrality

Chinese green governance aims to achieve green transition and high-quality development in agriculture. Economic growth theory uses total factor productivity (TFP), an index of input–output ratio, to measure development quality, which provides a classic framework to assess the process of green transition and high-quality development. On the way to carbon neutrality, the goal of green governance is to achieve a balancing act between “pollution reduction” and “greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction,” in addition to food security. Besides green policies, the government and other market entities can use non-institutional measures, including green technologies and finance, as green governance tools to achieve this end. This study clarifies the goals and tools of green governance and establishes a new analytic framework to investigate how to use these tools to achieve the aforementioned goals efficiently and effectively. The theoretical foundation, econometric method, and design of the new framework are introduced based on a TFP analysis. This framework sheds light on how to evaluate the achievement of these goals and how to accelerate green transition and high-quality development in the future.