Study On Forestland Technical Efficiency Of Rural Households In Western

Forestry is the foundation of ecological construction and the place of producing theecological products, and the forestland is the carrier of forestry development and ecologicalconstruction. A new round of reform of collective forest tenure reform changes the collectivemanagement under the unity of forestland ownership and management rights into "the tworights separation" of the rural households management, but the "western development,ecological priority", the policy controls the behavior of the rural households in the westernregion. Therefore, the non-timber forest products management is the main way of the ruralhouseholds’ forestland production in the western region and the ecologically fragile region ofChina. The purpose of the rural households managing forestland is to increase economicbenefits, and the increase of inputs and the improvement of production technical efficiencyare the resources of economic benefits. So the improvement of rural households’ forestlandtechnical efficiency not only increases the households’ income but also enhance the forestryecological function.This paper explains the technical efficiency measurement method based on productionfrontier theory and the distance function after defining the connotation of the technicalefficiency. Then, the empirical analysis was conducted by the rural households’ survey datafrom Yaan City Sichuan Province, which is one of the regions of the earliest implementationof Natural Forest Protection Project and Sloping Land Conversion Program. Using theanalysis on the rural households’ behavior of forestland management as a starting point, thepaper analyzes the rural households’ forestland technical efficiency and its influencing factorsfrom forestland manager, scale size, management mode in perspective.The main conclusionsare as follows:Firstly, the results indicate that the external environment of households managementforestland have the most impact on the households’ behavior of forest land management, thenthe forestland endowment in the middle, the family characteristics is the weakest，but theinfluence of laborers’ characteristics on forestland management behavior is difficult tomeasure. The measurable variables of external environment，including the households’understanding of government polices of forestry economics, technical training, influence between households and opportunity cost of household management forestland, show thesignificant impact on the households’ behavior of forestland management. The measurablevariables of forestland endowment, including the forestland fragmentation, the productivity ofsoil and the distance from home to forestland, have some effect on the households’ behaviorof forestland management. The ratio of forestry income to total revenue has the mostsignificant influence in the households’ family characteristic.Secondly, the features of rural households forestland management is labor forcefeminization, which not only affects the forestland management structure, input and output,but only effects technical efficiency. The rural households that the male and female laborengaged in agriculture and forestry production show a strong advantage, while ruralhouseholds that the female labor mainly engaged in agriculture and forestry shows vulnerablein forestland management.The technical efficiency loss shows that human resourceinvestment like education and technical training, experience and labor quantity have amarked positive effect on the production efficiency of households’ forestland management，while non-agricultural employment has a negative effect, and the rural household types showa marked effect.Thirdly，the management size and the households’ production technical displays aninverted “U” tendency, that means, medium-sized rural households have a higher productionefficiency than both small-sized and large-sized. The average of all rural households’forestland technical efficiency is64.38%, which shows that the technical efficiency of ruralhouseholds’ has a bigger room for technical efficiency enhancement in the existing productiontechnology and the same inputs. The technical efficiency loss shows that regardless of farmsize, human resource investment like education, technical training have a marked positiveeffect on the production technical efficiency of rural households, while non-farm managementa negative effect, besides other factors like family size, labors age and agro-cooperative donot show a market effect.Finally，the seeding and labor input are considered as the criteria of technology class，sothere are four technical classes on the different technology frontier and the technicalefficiency of them can be listed in the descending order，i.e. Class of livestock breeding&medicine in the understory, Class of fruit&woody medicine, Class of crops&vegetables inthe understory, Class of nut fruit. On the whole，the efficiency of all rural households’forestland management increase by1.79%in2011than in2008, except for Class of crops&vegetables in the understory, all other classes show the same increase trend. We estimate thefactors’ elasticity of different classes, and hold that it is the input-output elasticity differentwhy the households’ forestland management was divided into different classes. The input-output elasticity of the technical classes is different, the input-output elasticity of Classof livestock breeding&medicine in the understory is the highest, but the labor input-outputelasticity is negative in the Class of fruit&woody medicine and Class of crops&vegetablesin the understory, and the same result appears in the capital input-output elasticity of fruit&woody medicine Class.