| Facing the possibile shortage of maize supply, China should improve its maize production from now on. There are three factors, input factors, technical improvement and technical efficiency, influence the increase of maize yield. Because of the limitation of adding input and the difficulty of technical breakthrough, it is important to emphasise the improvement of technical efficiency for the purpose of expanding Chinese maize production.There are two ways, econometrics and linear programme, in the study of technical efficiency, of which definite frontier production function model and stochastic frontier production function model are the two common models. In this article, the author uses the stochastic frontier production function (Battese and Coelli, 1995)to estimate the maize technical efficiency of China, and discuss the factors that contribute to the technical efficiency.According to the study, there is a considerable loss of 19.6% on the maize technical efficiency with significant yearly difference, also between regions. The loss results from those factors, which are divided into three groups: the first one, drought, agriculture proportion and education index, is positively related with the loss of technical efficiency. The second, arable land per capita, weight of irrigation area and weight of new maize breed, is negatively related with it, and the last, water disaster and planting area of maize, is irrelated with that.This article points out that in China, the drought is aggravating gradually, agriculture proportion is decreasing slowly, arable area per capita, irrigation area and weight of diffusion area of new quality maize seed shows slow growth. It is difficult to improve maize technical efficiency. Therefore, measures must be taken to weaken the disadvantage of some factors that are unfavorable to maize technical efficiency. In the long run, the increase of maize yield must depend mostly on genetics improvement which breeding new higher yields maize variety.
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