Governance structure and performance of mariculture Sci-Tech parks: Evidence from Zhejiang Province, China

Abstract

Mariculture Sci-Tech parks promote modern mariculture and help improve China's mariculture industry. A park consists of a core area and a radiation area. The core area includes a farm, a cooperative, or a company, and the radiation area consists of many small farmers. Stochastic frontier analysis is employed to analyze the performance and its influencing factors of different governance structures in mariculture Sci-Tech parks. Results indicated the following: 1) Core areas show diminishing returns of scale, indicating that the increase in the scale of mariculture production can decrease the output. 2) The average technical efficiency of the core area is 0.4728, with the large family farms having the highest (0.4907), followed by the mariculture companies (0.4777) and the fish farmer cooperatives (0.4499). Several reasons can explain the difference in technical efficiency. First, family farms can better apply the new technology and new varieties to the mariculture production through moderate scale management. Second, companies have a higher operating cost, and the construction of mariculture Sci-Tech park has little effect on companies' performance. Third, cooperatives' advantage is not obvious in the organization management and the repeated construction of the infrastructure decreases utilization. 3) When the radiation area is considered, the input of large family farms has the most significant impact on the performance of the entire Sci-Tech park, with the highest driving efficiency. However, the cooperatives' driving efficiency is very poor, and the company performance is only reflected in the capital investment.