An Empirical Study On The Efficiency Of Agricultural Production In Hunan Province

Hunan Province, as a major agricultural province in central China, is known as the "land of plenty" reputation from ancient times. According to "Hunan Statistical Yearbook 2013", the population in the rural is 3830.46 million, and the province’s crop areas is 8.512 million hectares by 2012. In 2012 the province’s total output of agriculture is 490.41 billion yuan, ranking sixth in the 32 provincial administrative regions, and shares 22.13% of the province’s GDP. Thus, agriculture is still a large proportion in the national economy. So the study of Hunan agricultural productivity and efficiency has important significance for the development of agriculture in Hunan. At the same time have certain practical significance for the agricultural development policies. Therefore, this paper uses DEA and Malmquist model to study the agricultural productivity and the Reasons of the productivity change from 2007 to 2012 in Hunan Province.In the first part of this paper, we have statistical analysis for the agricultural production inputs and outputs from 2007 to 2012 in Hunan Province. And the Input elements include the rural labor force, land, power machinery, fertilizers and rural Power consumption.The second part employs the input-oriented and variable returns to scale DEA model to measure the region’s agricultural productivity, including the overall efficiency, pure technical efficiency and scale efficiency. The study shows that:(1) the overall efficiency of Hunan Province has a steady improvement from 2007 to 2012, and has a slight decline in 2009.(2) From a comparative study of the region finds that there have regional differences in the agricultural productivity, the lowest is Zhangjiajie City, the highest is Hengyang City.(3)The lagging regions have low level of agricultural efficiency due to the lower efficiency of agricultural production scale.The third part of the paper use the DEA-Malmquist index model study TFP change index based on 2007-2012 Hunan municipal panel data. And study the reasons for changes in agricultural productivity find that:(1) the average annual agricultural TFP growth rate is 5.4% During the period 2007-2012 in Hunan, indicating that the overall efficiency of agricultural production in Hunan period is effective. And from the overall average growth rate of the index of decomposition, the period Hunan agricultural TFP growth mainly comes from advancement in technology, and the contribution of TFP is 3.7%.(2) The total factor productivity of agriculture in Hunan Province has significant volatility, but the overall Shows growth trend and only have a negative growth in the period of 2008-2009.Through the above studies, we can provide the following recommendations for the development of agricultural production to increase agricultural productivity in Hunan Province:(1) we can employ low-carbon development model to improve agriculture efficiency through learning from other areas of advanced agricultural production patterns;(2)Increase agricultural production and add more investment in science and technology to improve the efficiency of agricultural production technology;(3) Pay more attention to the promotion of agricultural production scale efficiency, especial in the aspect of land-intensive operations management, accelerate land reform and agricultural management improvement.