Research On The Technical Efficiency Of Potato Cooperatives In Western China

With the development of the population, the urbanization, and the improving of people’s living standards in China, the demand for food is rigidly growing, the food supply pressure is increasing continuously. In the case that other main grains reach the maximum potential, developing potato industry, and increasing potato’s supply capacity as a main grain, are strategic measures to enhance the level of food security in China. Healthy development of potato industry needs corresponding production patterns. Taking potato cooperatives as the research object, researching on cooperation efficiency and operation mode, make a lot to optimize the potato production patterns as well as to promote the sustainable development of the potato industry.Based on survey, this thesis carries out SWOT analysis on the potato cooperatives in western area, which reveals the characteristics and problems existing in the present stage of potato cooperatives; Translog Production function and Stochastic Frontier Approach is combined to calculate the technical efficiency of western potato cooperatives and some countermeasures are put forward. Main progresses and conclusions are as follows:1、Potato cooperatives have obvious advantages than other potato productive organization forms. The planting-cooperative is the mainly type in western potato cooperatives. There are several advantages of potato cooperatives according to the survey, such as concentrated and abundant funds,Specific business, concentrated human resource and scale production, unified technical specification, centralized management and flexible investment form, perfect public infrastructure and welfare, centralized government support, etc.2、The productive organization form of western potato cooperatives should be improved. The potato cooperatives have some obvious problems: high shareholding concentration,lack of high-quality capable technical and management talents, rapidly rising costs and lack of funds, arbitrage financial capital, the council is lack in uniform standards of management, over concentration of business operations and lack of competitiveness, etc.3、The overall output of western potato cooperatives still has great potential for improvement. The result of SFA shows that western planting potato cooperatives have an average technical efficiency of 0.603, In other words, 0.603 of potential output. However, the elasticity of western planting potatoes cooperatives is 0.542 in total, which means scale production decline stage. The elasticity shows that there is a redundancy in costs and scale. Thus,at present, potato cooperatives should improve fixed assets and human resources as well as slow down the increasing of costs and scale.4、There are six factors significantly affecting the western cooperatives’ efficiency loss. Ages(Z1)、Expert guidance(Z4)and Difference degree in Stake(Z6)pay positive effects on efficiency, otherwise, Natural talent(Z2)、Quantities of cooperative’s business(Z9)、Incentive method for management(Z10)pay the negative effects. Therefore, great importance should be attached to the accumulation of experience, the relations of other planting industry and the development of potato industry should be coordinated, strengthen the expert guidance, improve the technical level; optimize the industrial structure; management specification; improve the existing incentives method.