Changes in productivity, efficiency and technology of China's crop production under rural restructuring

Abstract

Food security is the fundamental problem of sustainable socioeconomic development in China. Since the 1990s, due to rapid socioeconomic development, the loss of cultivated land in China has become increasingly serious. In the context of inefficient assurances about the quantity of cultivated land, improving the productivity of crop production has become an important breakthrough in the new era to ensure food security in China. At present, China's agricultural development is at the stage of transition from traditional agriculture to modern agriculture. In the course of the agricultural transformation in China, what change has occurred to the total factor productivity (TFP) of crop production under rural restructuring becomes a problem worthy of in-depth study. Therefore, this study used the panel data of 31 provinces/autonomous regions in China from 1999 to 2008, and combined the traditional three-stage Malmquist productivity index (MPI) with the Bootstrap-Malmquist productivity index (Bootstrap-MPI) to measure the changes of the TFP of crop production in China. On the whole, the traditional MPI model underestimated the TFP of China's crop production and its components, the technical change (TC) index and technical efficiency change (TEC) index. After the ratification with the bootstrap method, the TFP of China's crop production had an annual average increase rate of 6.1% from 1999 to 2008, with obvious fluctuations in different time periods. Since the implementation of the protective policy for grain purchase prices in the 1990s, the TFP of crop production in China began to decrease. However, the TFP increased dramatically after the rural tax reform 2002–2003.