Research On Economic Efficiency Of Mutton Sheep Production In China

With the rapid development of China’s economy and the improvement of people’s living standards,food safety,nutrition,healthy diet has become a new concept of residents.Compared to pork,mutton has peculiar characteristics such as delicacy,low fat,less cholesterol,and higher protein,make it more positively in the meat consumption.Although current Chinese sheep breeding and mutton production ranked first in the world,but still cannot effectively meet the growing domestic market demand for mutton.Since 1995,Chinese mutton trade patterns are shown as net importers,and began to become the world’s largest mutton import Country in 2012.In the future,Chinese mutton tight supply trend will continue to exist.Recently years,the unstable fluctuations price of mutton market also showed that the Chinese sheep industry does not provide adequate and effective security for the mutton market,and the settlement of this problem makes the sheep industry become the focus and hot topic.Compared with developed countries such as Australia,Britain,New Zealand,China’s mutton yield level is still relatively low.In order to cope with the phenomena such as global climate increasingly deterioration,frequent natural disasters and the grassland ecological environment destruction caused by growing population,China has implemented the basic grassland protection system since 2003.To a certain extent,it is restricted the unlimited expansion of pastoral farmers and herdsmen in sheep breeding scale,so as to promote the transfer for the main areas of sheep production from pastoral to rural,and the turn for farming methods gradually from grazing to feed,semi-feed.The development of major production areas is still relatively backward,fanning methods are more traditional,and the situation of "Livestock is at the mercy of the forces of nature" did not change.While domestic sheep standardized scale levels are rising,but the overall level is not high.Facing increasing domestic lamb gap between supply and demand,grassland ecological environment pressure and resources supply constraints,it is determined that we must constantly improve meat sheep’s production technology level and economic efficiency,instead of unlimited expand the number of meat sheep or production inputs.Based on the theories of production,economic efficiency,farmer behavior and scale economy,the paper applies the Descriptive statistical analysis,Field investigation and analysis,Statistical comparative analysis and Econometric analysis method to carry out the research.Firstly,the basic situation of meat sheep production in the world and China is expounded.Secondly,Nonparametric method(BCC model and DEA cost efficiency model),Parametric method(Translog stochastic frontier production function model),Tobit model and Spatial lag stochastic frontier model are used to analyze the economic efficiency of meat sheep production and its influencing factors which refers to different perspectives such as varieties and culture patterns,regional,agricultural herdsmen and scale farms.Finally,propose suggestions to improve the economic efficiency of China meat production.The main conclusions are:① Sheep breeding in the world has been expanding and shown a tendency to focus on Asia and Africa;Meanwhile,China’s sheep breeding and meat production continues to increase,sheep produced meat performance also significantly improve,and production trends are apparent.②China’s meat sheep industry has been changing and upgrading,sheep breeding towards the direction of large-scale development,but its scale is not high.③From 2012 to 2015,there are significant technical efficiency losses in the production of meat sheep under different species and culture models in China;Goats have a higher level of technical efficiency than sheep,and self-breeding mode is higher than professional fattening.④ Under the self-breeding and professional fattening models,the total factor productivity index of goat production showed a downward trend in the 2012-2015;There was a phenomenon that technology efficiency increased and technology degradation coexisted in sheep production under the model of self-breeding,while under the professional fattening model shows a slight increase in technical efficiency.⑤ The economic efficiency of China’s sheep production shows obvious regional difference,and in recent years,the rapid growth of the total factor productivity of the sheep has been mainly attributed to technological progress rather than technical efficiency.⑥ There were significant economic efficiency losses in the production of meat sheep in sample farming herdsmen and scale farms,among which the education level of the householder,the training of culture technology and the availability of government support had significant positive effects on the economic efficiency of the production of herdsmen meat sheep.