Rice Production Behavior And Efficiency From Concurrent Business Perspective

The core of three dimensional rural issues is to increase farmers’ income, which essentially depends on farmers’participation in the division of labor and transformation of employment structure. After more than thirty years’ reform and development of the market, with the implementation of household contract responsibility system and barriers broken down of rural labor force between urban and rural areas, farmers’ concurrent business becomes a widespread phenomenon, which effectively promotes the development of rural economy. However, with the further development of industrialization and city construction, the deepening of rural reform and the changing structure of the income of farmers, problems of farmers’concurrent business hinder the development of productivity increasingly exposed.In this research on the basis of previous studies, based on the perspective of concurrent business, systematically analyses the impact of farmers’ rice production behavior and efficiency from both theoretical and empirical. First defines the criteria for farmers’ concurrent business, degree of concurrent business, rice production behavior, then builds a mechanism on farmers’ concurrent business to rice production behavior and efficiency, through questionnaires about 442 rice growers in Baoying, Shuyang, Funing, Xinghua, Haian, uses comparative analysis and single factor analysis to systematically describe rice production behavior of different rural households. Finally, chooses the reasonable evaluation, uses the data envelopment analysis (DEA) to estimate the various degree of concurrent business farmers’ rice production efficiency, to find out effects of farmers’ concurrent business on rice production behavior and efficiency.On the theoretical and empirical basis, the main conclusions are as follows:(1) concurrent business is very common in sample area, and the majority of sample farmers are "small farmers" in the traditional sense, with small scale, high age, low education and quality. Annual income of the farm business type Ⅱ households is higher than that of the farm business type Ⅰ households and the exclusive farming households, and the income rises with the deepening of concurrent business. (2) The factor of farmers’ concurrent business has an obvious effect on the choices related to rice production behavior, as inputs are significantly different. Totally speaking, inputs of capital, labor, fertilization and land scale for exclusive farming households are higher than mixed farm business households, which finally enables exclusive farming households to receive the highest output. (3) Differences in behaviors of rice production lead to different rice production efficiency of different rural households. Rice production efficiency of exclusive farming households is higher than farm business type Ⅰ households, while both are much higher than farm business type Ⅱ households. More exclusive farming households are in high efficient while more mixed farm business households are in low efficient, and most are farm business type Ⅱ households. (4) From the constitution of rice production efficiency, the pure technological efficiency of the three types of farm households are all low, exclusive farming households is higher than farm business type Ⅰ households and farm business type Ⅱ households. In addition, the production scale is still quite small, almost more than half of each type farm households are in a phase of increasing returns to scale.In the end, to promote farmers’participation in the division of labor and transformation of employment structure, and achieve double wins between concurrent business and high efficiency, the research puts forward a number of recommendations:the government should actively promote institutional innovation, transfer farm business type Ⅱ households to non-agricultural sectors, improve the land transfer system, expand production scales of farmers who are willing and able to engage in agricultural production, deepening efforts to promote science and technology to improve rice production.