Theoretical And Empirical Research On Agricultural Regional Specialization

Western developed countries’ agricultural history shows regional specialization is the basic premise and important method to promote agricultural economy. China’s agricultural regional specialization started from the early1980s and has made some achievements, but specialization level is still low. Thus, how to fast improve agricultural regional specialization has a very important practical significance in promoting the China’s agricultural development.This paper first makes theoretical analysis of agricultural regional specialization and explains the formation mechanism. Then, it describes production areas and the change of China’s main crops (rice, wheat, corn, peanuts and cotton).Finally, this paper uses relevant knowledge of spatial econometrics to establish spatial models to investigate the influencing factors of the China’s gricultural regional specialization in the provincial level.This paper separately puts forward forming reasons and forming conditions of agricultural regional specialization. The former includes regional comparative advantage, scale-economy advantage and farmers’ income effect. The latter includes demand condition, supply condition, supporting facility and agricultural policy. From descriptive analysis of the regional specialized agriculture in our country, this study finds that China’s rice production transfers from southeast coastal areas to north, especially to Liaoning, Heilongjiang and Jilin; and wheat production shows the trend of moving from northeast and southwest to east China and central south; corn increases mainly in the northeast and north China; the peanut industry is in good condition and the yields of traditional main producing areas continuously increase; change in cotton producing areas is obvious, which shows the trend of transferring from central east to Xinjiang rapidly and the latter has become the biggest cotton producing area. Finally, this paper uses relevant knowledge of spatial econometrics to establish spatial econometric models to investigate the influencing factors of the China’s agricultural regional specialization in the provincial level.According to the conclusions, this paper makes the following suggestions:strengthen agricultural infrastructure construction and improve the level of agricultural science and technology; intensify agricultural subsidies and expand the scope of agricultural insurance;speed up development of agricultural specialization in less developed rural areas;perfect agricultural land circulation mechanism and expand the scale of agricultural production.