| With the implementation for grassland contract-responsibility, pastoral family becomes the most important unit of the business decisions. Choice of herdsmen behavior is not only aimed at their own needs, but also an adaptive response to social economy and environment resources of prairie system. So features of pastoral family determine its social and economic behaviors to a large extent.As a policy-maker on allocation of family resource, householder directly affects income and allocative efficiency of family resource. Age of householder reflects the level of his perception and adaptability to the local resource and economic structure. So we must make clear how the age of householder affects investment on pastoral element and allocative efficiency with emphasis on the relationship between them.This paper firstly proposes DEA method to measure and analyze the productive efficiencies of 57-household in Chen Barag county and 53-household in Xin Barag Left county respectively, productive efficiency referred here is defined to be technological efficiency, it is divided into pure technological efficiency and scale efficiency. Age of householder is chosen to be the key variable to measure cycle of family life and clarify the relationship between pastoral productive efficiency and each stage of family life. Secondly, this paper evaluates the actual engaged pastoral area based on simple mathematical analysis for the optimal engaged pasture area in investment on pastoral element; the evaluation provides a reference which has practical significance for policy-makers and herdsmen.Results show that:Most herdsmen in Chen Barag county and Xin Barag Left county have higher productive efficiency in their condition of production, and more than half of them are in stage of increasing production. The lower degree of scale is the main reason of low-production efficiency of herdsmen.The two analysis results are nearly the same for these two counties,it is believed that family life cycle theory is feasible in pastoral area. Besides, it cannot bring the greatest economic profit to families if they are in pursuit of the optimal productive efficiency and behaviors such as overloading encouraged by highest income are not feasible. |
