Studies On Efficiency Of Grain Production In Hubei Province

Food security is always the basis of China's economic development, social stability and national security, it is also a major strategic issue related to overall situation. Since the founding of China, with the party and government's great effort, China has feed more than20%of the world's total population with less than10%of the world's total cultivated land, and made greatly contribution to the world's anti-poverty improvement and food security. However, China domestic food supply situation is not so optimistic, potential crisis in food supplying still exists. China still needs to pay highly and long-term attention to food security. In China, food production and supply is restrained by resources and ecological environment. Besides, due to the rapid development of urbanization, industrialization and biomass energy, as well as the relative low returns of grain cultivation and the deepen adjustment of agricultural structure, a great deal of production factors flee to the other production areas. At the same time, environmental pollution in rural area is increasingly gradually serious, threatening the sustainable development of food security. With regard to food demand, natural population growth, food structure's upgrade and rapid development of biomass energy stimulate improving the food demand which further intensify the contradictions between food supply and demand. Food security problems'solving mainly relies on China itself. China's major grain producing areas take the major responsibility in solving food safety problems, to improve their grain production efficiency is the key to achieve national food security, especially raising the technical efficiency and total factor productivity.As one of China's thirteen major grain producing areas, Hubei province holds the representative status. In recent years, the average annual commercialization rate of grain of Hubei is35%, that means roughly18billion kilograms. Hubei province makes an important contribution to national food safety. However, Hubei's grain production is also restricted by resources and ecological environment, so it is pressing to improve the productivity of grain producing. This study works in the framework of technical efficiency and total factor productivity theory, using the production frontier approach to analyze the productivity of grain production in Hubei province systematically. On the basis of discussing Hubei grain production's cost-benefit and single-factor productivity's change, this paper calculates the technical efficiency and total factor productivity of Hubei province's grain productivity from the macro, meso and micro perspective. In this way, this paper finds out the achievements and status of Hubei province's grain production in China, the production efficiency of different main grain varieties whose internal relations and difference and comparative advantage in Hubei, and the technological and social bottleneck in raising the productivity. This study is composed of eight parts, which are as follows.The first chapter is the introduction part, the beginning of this paper presents sevral issues to be resolved on the base of reviewing international and domestic background. Then, the writer will introduce the relative international and domestic studies in details in order to find the room to improve. After that, it details the research contents, ideas, technical route and methods of the study. Finally, the innovation points in this study were demonstrated.The second chapter introduces Hubei's grain production's historical change and current situation. Fisrstly, this chapter illustrates Hubei's grain production's advantage. Then, the grain production's development process will be analyzed and the experience of grain production will be summarized. Subsequently, this chapter will analyze Hubei's various constraints of the grain production's sustainable development.The third chapter seeks grain production's input-output characteristics and single-factor productivity of Hubei's grain production. In order to find out the resources' utilization effectiveness and the features of technical progress of grain production, this chapter will make a general description and statistical analysis of economic efficiency indicators and resource utilization indicators, which are represented by cost-profit and single factor productivity,.The fourth chapter illustrates the technical efficiency of grain production from the macro-level. This chapter takes the pollution into account, and uses directional distance function and max DEA to focus on calculating the grain producing efficiency of Hubei province, then, compares the results of technical efficiency whether consider the pollution or not.The fifth chapter focuses on grain production's total factor productivity from the macro-level. As the same as the chapter four, environmental pollution factors were supposed to be "the non-desired output" during the grain production. Based on the provincial input-output balance panel data, this study measures and decomposes grain production's total factor productivity under the situation whether consider environmental factors or not by sequence DEA, environmental directional distance function and the Malmquist-Luenberger index methods.Chapter six analyzes the grain production's productivity in Hubei province in meso-level. This chapter explores grain production's static technical efficiency and dynamic total factor productivity and its decomposition. Specifically, this chapter uses county panel data in Hubei province and sequential DEA model to calculate the five main grain varieties'productivity, including early, middle and late indica rice, wheat and corn's technical efficiency and total factor productivity's growth and decomposition.The seventh chapter looks out the productivity and its micro-decisive factors in Hubei province in the micro-level. This part uses the data of rural households in Hubei province, regression analysis and one-step approach to estimate the impact of farmers' various household characteristics and condition variables on farmers'technical efficiency and total factor productivity.The eigth chapter draws basic conclusions and views the research prospects. The basic conclusions drawn from the study here and the policy implications contained are summarized review of this dissertation. Then, this chapter elaborates the shortcomings of this reserch and the further researches that the dissertation should make in the future.The main conclusions of this study are as follows:Hubei province is one of the major grain producing areas in China and it has great advantages in grain production. Since the founding of China, the overall grain production situation in Hubei was well and the grain economy shows its somewhat growth. Moreover, Hubei contributes considerably to national food security. However, with the economic development and agricultural structure's further adjustment, the sustainability of grain production in Hubei faces many challenges. Under the constrains of resources and environment, Hubei province has to choose an intensive modern agriculture development path with the features of improving grain productivity. Since the reform and opening of China, the growth of Hubei's grain productivity has been the protection of the growth of grain yield. Also, the contributions by the productivity growth which is related to the economic development level of national and local economy to the agricultural growth are periodic in general. From the actual performance of Hubei's grain production patterns, as comparing to most of the other grain producing provinces, Hubei's "environmentally-friendly" performance during grain production is better than its "resource-saving" performance. In short, the grain's Total Factor Productivity growth is mainly driven by the frontier technological progress, and the contribution of the technical efficiency improvements is limited, in other words, the improvement of grain productivity in Hubei province is kind of "single drive" growth mode. The grain production's technical efficiency plays the key role in improving the whole productivity. From the perspectives of grain productivity's influencing factors, farmers'various household characteristics and state variables have a significant impact on Hubei's grain productivity.