Research On Technical Efficiency Of Freshwater Shrimp Farming

In China shrimp is an essential part of most people’s diet. Due to its advantage on nutrition and taste freshwater shrimp has become one of the shrimp with high economic value which is welcome among both farmers and consumers. China produces the most freshwater shrimp over the world. Freshwater shrimp lives in most of the fresh water from the south to the north of China. As a high quality aquatic product freshwater shrimp farming has been promoted over China with growing farming scale and area. Especially nowadays consumers have higher requirements on food safety freshwater shrimp got more welcomed by the markets with its rich nutrient and safety. Jiangsu province has a long history of freshwater shrimp farming. The governance has given high priority on freshwater industry. Since the twenty1st century Jiangsu province has brought forward a few provincial projects which involve with variety improvement, variety selection, variety promotion, pollution-free farming techniques and variety breeding of freshwater shrimp. However with the growing farming cost the freshwater shrimp industry is facing many problems. How is the cost and profit of freshwater shrimp farming? How is the input-output ratio? How about the technical efficiency and what are the factors? This paper will study on the cost, input-output ratio and technical efficiency in terms of freshwater shrimp farming so as to provide theoretical and practical basis for freshwater shrimp farming.Combining theoretical studies with field research data of freshwater shrimp farming in Jiangsu province, this paper will describe the current situation of freshwater farming in Jiangsu province, analyze the cost structure, input-output ratio and technical efficiency with descriptive statistics, comparative analysis and empirical analysis. Furthermore study on the factors influencing the output and technical efficiency of freshwater shrimp so as to provide theoretical basis and experience reference for improving technical efficiency, allocating resources rationally, saving production cost, increasing freshwater shrimp yield and increasing the income of farmers.A Stochastic Frontier Function and the Translog Production Function have been chosen to analyze the technical efficiency of freshwater shrimp farming. The main conclusions:(1)There are significant technical efficiency losses during the freshwater shrimp farming process. The average technical efficiency in Jiangsu Province is0.90. Among all the factors the degree of specialization of farmers, taking part in technical trainings, technical guidance, participating in a fishery cooperative and professional degree contributes to the technical efficiency significantly. Education background, age of shrimp farming and state subsidy has a negative effect on the technical efficiency.(2)The output elasticity of larval shrimp cost and water lease are positive which means these inputs contribute to the freshwater shrimp yield. The output elasticity of labor input, feed cost, fertilizer cost and medicine cost are negative.(3)There are many problems facing freshwater shrimp farming. The most prominent one is that most of the freshwater shrimp are cultivated by petty farmers. These farmers are in a lack of scientific farming techniques and management skills and their organization level are low which are bad for resources allocation and new variety promotion.Based on the above analysis, this paper put forward five proposals concerning the problems facing freshwater shrimp farming in Jiangsu province, how to improve the technical efficiency and yield and how to save cost. Besides these researches this paper raised some study prospects in the future.