Empirical Study On Technical Efficiency Of Grain Production In Shaanxi Province

Grain is very principal merchandise related to national interest and people’s livelihood,Grain is also basis in terms of economic development,social stability and nationalindependence, and keeping the national grain safe is still the major event for administratingstate affairs well and ensure national security.Since2004, the grain production in Shaanxiprovince has a bumper harvest, but due to the rapid growth of the national economy and theincrease of population, grain consumption grows up inflexibly.At the same time, returningfarmland to forest and grassland, grain acreage reduction year after year, soil and waterresource,climate factors restrict the sustainable growth of grain output.Limited foodproduction growth and increasing demand of grain consumption make grain security meet acertain challenge.An effective way to increase grain production is to improve the technicalefficiency of grain production.This paper study the actual status of grain production inShaanxi province from the production technical efficiency perspective. Based on the paneldata of grain production in Shaanxi province during the period of2001~2010,a stochastictranslog production frontier was specified to estimate technical efficiency of grainproduction,and then, analyzing the convergence and the influential factors of grainproduction efficiency. The main conclusion obtained as follows:(1)The technical efficiency of grain production is0.7983,which is not very high.but itindicated that there are great additional potentials on the technical efficiency.(2)Spatial differentials of grain production efficiency exist in Shaanxi province. We testfor absolute and conditional convergence hypothesis for grain production efficiency,the resultshows there is no absolute convergence, but only significant conditional convergence isdiscovered. Which imply that grain production efficiency will approach to their respectivesteady-state level, but do not ultimately achieve the same steady-state level.(3)Land input, progress in agricultural science and technology and the level of economicdevelopment has a significant effect on improving technical efficiency of grain production;different agricultural policies have different effects on grain production: non-food cropsplanting area accounts for the proportion of the total planting area has a negative effect toimprove grain production efficiency;Natural conditions have a significant effect on technical efficiency of grain production.In addition, it gives several policy suggestions based on the technical efficiency analysisof the grain production in Shaanxi province.