Education level of farmers, market-oriented reforms, and the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources in China

The utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources has an overall and long-term impact on agricultural development. However, owing to serious wastage of agricultural water resources for a long time, low utilization efficiency of such water resources has become a common problem in developing countries. Past studies have paid scant attention to the impact of soft factors, namely farmers’ educational level and market-oriented reforms, especially in a quantified form, on the improvement of agricultural water utilization efficiency. This study adopted the system Generalized Method of Moments estimation method of a dynamic panel model and used provincial panel data from China for 2007–2020 period. The results show that the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources can indeed be improved by either promoting farmers’ education levels or deepening market-oriented reforms. However, with the advancement of market-oriented reforms, the influence of farmers’ education level on the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources gradually weakens, which is due to the “agricultural to non-agricultural” effect. Finally, this paper proposes policy suggestions to improve the utilization efficiency of agricultural water resources from three perspectives: improving the education level of farmers, optimizing the agricultural water pricing system, and improving the agricultural water rights trading system.