Study On The Technical Efficiency Of Urban Land In Shaanxi Province

Shaanxi province is currently in the rapid period of accelerating the industrialization process from the initial stage to middle stage, and the urbanization far lags behind industrialization. In this phase, the demand-supply contradiction of urban land resources is becoming particularly prominent. Given the scarcity of land resources and the restraint of basic state policy, it's difficulty to relax the bottleneck of land resources in the process of economic development by continuing to expand the supply of urban land. This dilemma has become an urgent issue. Under assumptions that the economic output and other inputs were kept constant, this study assesses the technically feasible minimum input of urban land resources from the perspective of technical efficiency. Which reveals the potential savings of urban land use, and then to provide economized using standard for land-use management.Based on the panel data of urban across regions of Shaanxi during the period of 2000～2007, this paper specified a stochastic translog production frontier to estimate the technical efficiency of urban land(or urban land efficiency), which is estimated as input-oriented technical efficiency of a single input, and then, analyzing the convergence and the influential factors of land efficiency. The main conclusion obtained as follows:(1)The main input-oriented urban land efficiency is 0.7281 in Shaanxi province, the result indicates that the observed quantity of urban economic output could have been maintained by using the observed values of other inputs while using approximately 30% less of urban land.(2) Spatial differentials of urban land efficiency exist in Shaanxi province. We test for absolute and conditional convergence hypothesis for urban land efficiency, using cross-section and panel data. That is, no evidence exists of absolute convergence, but only significant conditional convergence is discovered. Which imply that urban land efficiency will approach to their respective steady-state level, but do not ultimately achieve the same steady-state level.(3) Land marketization and economic development level have active roles in improving the urban land efficiency; different strategies of urbanization have different effects on the urban land efficiency, extensive expansion of the urban space has a negative effect to improve urban land efficiency, an appropriate choice of a road to developing small towns in urbanization is conducive to improve urban land efficiency; the urbanization level and industrial structure although show positive correlation with urban land efficiency, but not statistically significant, the possible explanations need further explore.Compared with the existing literature, the main innovations in this thesis can be summarized in the following aspects.(1)Presents a clear definition of urban land efficiency, this paper strip out urban land efficiency from urban technical efficiency, which is estimated as input-oriented technical efficiency of a single input, so as to make up for the deficiency existing in evaluation of urban land efficiency based on production frontier theory.(2) On the basis of estimate the technical efficiency of urban land, this paper further analyze the convergence and the influential factors of land efficiency, which provide empirical evidences for policies to improve urban land efficiency.