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Addressing the excessive input and inefficient use of agrochemicals are crucial for global food security, environmental protection, and human health. This paper offers a new idea from the perspective of outsourcing agricultural production. The impact of outsourcing on the frequency and intensity of agrochemical inputs were theoretically analyzed and empirically tested using a field survey of 1211 farmers in Heilongjiang, Henan, and Hunan, the major food-producing areas in China. A Logit regression framework was used to analyze the effect, a conditional mixture process (CMP) method was used to address potential endogeneity concerns, and a mediation effect model was used to dissect the mechanism. The results show that the effect of outsourcing on both input frequency and input intensity of agrochemicals was positive at the 1% significance level. The positive effect conclusion still holds even after addressing the potential endogeneity concerns, and in the sub-sample estimates for maize, wheat, and rice. We conclude that outsourcing can improve the utilization efficiency of agrochemicals by increasing the frequency of agrochemical inputs, but fail to solve the excessive agrochemical inputs and even leads to a further increase in the intensity of agrochemical inputs. Moreover, the mechanism for an increase in agrochemical input intensity due to outsourcing was explored, and it is more likely to be caused by inhibiting farmers' investment in soil improvement measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• This study calculates industrial land green efficiency using SBM-Undesirable model. • Average ILGE in the eastern region is higher than central and western regions. • More cities with high ILGE appear to be concentrated in the eastern region. • Regional internal ILGE differences are gradually decreasing. In the context of the construction of an ecologically sustainable civilization and green development, the continuous improvement in industrial land green use has played an important role in China. Only a few studies have evaluated industrial land-use efficiency from the perspective of ecological economy. Considering energy consumption and undesirable outputs simultaneously, this study evaluated the industrial land green efficiency (ILGE) of 198 cities in China from 2007 to 2015 using the Slacks-based Measure (SBM)-Undesirable model, and spatial convergence methods were used to analyze the trend of ILGE. The study found clear regional differences in ILGE. The average ILGE in the eastern region was much higher than that in the central and western regions. From a temporal perspective, the average ILGE in all cities has gradually decreased since 2007 and fell to its lowest value in 2013. However, the ILGE showed a continuous upward trend in the final two years. Most cities with high ILGE values appeared to be concentrated in the eastern region. Fifteen cities with scores of 1.00 accounted for 8.6% of the total, indicating that they are the most efficient in the sample over all the years studied. Heilongjiang Province had the lowest ILGE, with 75% of the cities located in the lowest 30 places of the ILGE ranking. The national, eastern, and central regions showed an unstable short-term characteristic of σ -convergence since 2013. Absolute and conditional β -convergence existed in all regions, indicating that cities with poorer efficiency have a faster ILGE growth rate than leading cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]