Herders’ Technical Efficiency And Its Influencing Factors

Grassland of Inner Mongolia, as one of China’s largest natural pasture and mostimportant production base for livestock, not only functions as zoology protectivescreen in North China, but also provides shelter for ethnic minorities, especiallyMongols. In recent years, along with the environment deterioration, how to protectnatural grassland and corresponded issues related with the animal husbandry,herdsmen and pastoral area become more and more prominent and urgent. The slowgrowth of herders’ income is the core of this issue, directly hindering the economicdevelopment of pastoral areas and sustainable utilization of grassland resources.Meanwhile, because of the ethnic and religious problems involved, it may also affectthe development of harmonious society in our country. So the issues related withprotecting the grassland and increasing the income of herders should be better settledquickly.However, present production of animal husbandry in Inner Mongolia stilldepends on extensive operation, and herdsmen’s production efficiency under giventechnical level is not high. So to improve the efficiency becomes an optional choiceof increasing income for herdsmen. By studying the production and operationprocess, this paper aims to analyze the technical efficiency of herdsmen and itsinfluencing factors, and to provide specific suggestions for herdsmen to improve thetechnical efficiency of livestock production, and increase husbandry income.Based on the survey data of Xilingole league area of Inner Mongolia, this paperuses Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) to analyze the technical efficiency ofherdsmen, identify major factors that influence the technical efficiency. The resultsare as follows:In production function, the pasture area, the investment in productive machinesand other inputs such as veterinary have significantly positive influences onherdsmen’s output. The more this three kinds of investment, the more herdsmen’ output is. In addition, the geographical factor is also very important. Herdsmen’soutput in Desert Steppe is significantly higher than that in Meadow Steppe, whileherdsmen in Sandy Grassland get the lowest outcome.In technical efficiency function, it is found that local herdsmen’s technicalefficiency is very low, averagely between only0.48and0.61, remaining to beimproved. And, according to different dependent variables, the calculated technicalefficiencies are different. The technical efficiency of the animal husbandry income issignificantly lower than that of animal husbandry related revenues, and also lowerthan that of animal husbandry net output, indicating that the local herdsmen need toenhance the capacity of converting the livestock output to monetary income.Family labor force and pasture fragmentation factors have salient effects on thetechnical efficiency. Controlling the number of pastures owned by the herdsmen, themore labor force the herdsmen have, the smaller the average size of pasture，thehigher the technical efficiency is. Moreover, irregular shape of pasture is also foundto harm the efficiency easily.After further digging into the statistical and econometric analysis, this paperconcludes that: firstly, pasture fragmentation would hinder the improvement oftechnical efficiency; secondly, increasing the family labor force and enhancing thecooperation could improve the technical efficiency; thirdly, the pasture area ofherdsmen has a significantly positive influence on income growth; fourthly,promoting the mechanization and elaboration of animal husbandry management canalso improve the income; finally, the herdsmen who have bigger scale livestock canachieve higher unit value, and then increases their income.To the end, the paper suggests that herdsmen can improve scale and elaborateanimal husbandry management and the mechanization of it by pasture circulation andjoint operation and so on.