Abstract: In order to scientifically evaluate the efficiency of rural small financial institutions in supporting agriculture and build a good rural financial environment, taking the efficiency of rural small financial institutions in six provinces in central China as the object, data envelopment analysis （DEA） was used to conduct empirical analysis to study the level of pure technical efficiency, scale efficiency and technical efficiency of rural small financial institutions in supporting agriculture. The results showed that, on the whole, the rural financial resources in the six central provinces of China had not been effectively allocated. In 2019, the average technical efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency of small-scale financial institutions in the six central provinces were 0.886, 0.934 and 0.944, respectively. This also showed that there was still room for improvement in the operational efficiency, management level, as well as the scale of resource allocation of China’s rural small financial institutions.

Key words: rural economy, efficiency of financial support for agriculture, DEA, rural small financial institutions