Measuring Improvement of Economic Condition in State-Owned Forest Farms’ in China

Rongyuan Chen,Mingxing Hu,Wei Huang,Wenhui Chen

doi:10.3390/su12041593

Abstract

An important policy cornerstone for China to reduce poverty includes China’s goal of achieving complete poverty alleviation in its state-owned forest farms by 2020. This study describes and documents the poverty reduction effect in impoverished Chinese state-owned forest farms. Based on a sample of 4855 state-owned forest farms in 31 provinces in China from 2008 to 2017, this paper uses the difference-in-difference method to study the dynamic process of poverty reduction by policies for impoverished state-owned forest farms. The results show that the implementation of the policy significantly promoted the economic development of impoverished state-owned forest farms and caused the treatment group to increase by approximately 10.6% over the control group. Moreover, the establishment of a list of impoverished state-owned forest farms had an indirect impact on the economic performance of forest farms, through channels such as infrastructure poverty alleviation, human capital investment, and per capita income of forest farm employees. Additionally, the effects of the policy on non-impoverished counties were stronger than that on impoverished counties, and impoverished state-owned forest farms may not appear in impoverished counties. The degree of financial dependence of the local government had a significant positive impact on the economic development of impoverished state-owned forest farms. The effects of the policy on different forest farms were heterogeneous. Our study provides recommendations for the future development of impoverished Chinese state-owned forest farms and for the improvement of poverty alleviation efficiency.

Highlights

Due to the continuous growth of the global population and the increase in demand for food and land, there has been unprecedented interest in sustainable forest management (SFM)
The main empirical results of the policy evaluation of the establishment of impoverished state-owned forest farms are divided into three parts: First, using the Difference-in-Difference (DID)method to estimate the impact of the establishment of impoverished state-owned forest farms on the economic development level of state-owned forest farms
According to model (1), the logarithmic value of the state-owned forest farms, lnyield, was used as the explanatory variable in order to estimate the average effect of the poverty reduction policy of listing the impoverished state-owned forest farms on reducing the vulnerability of the impoverished forest farms to validate the first research hypothesis

Summary

Introduction

Due to the continuous growth of the global population and the increase in demand for food and land, there has been unprecedented interest in sustainable forest management (SFM). China’s forest area ranks fifth in the world, with a total of 220 million hectares, accounting for 5% of the global forest area. It is the country with the largest annual net growth in forest area, an average annual increase of 1.542 million hectares and the forest coverage rate reached 22.9% [6]. As of 2018, the number of Chinese state-owned forest farms had reached 4855, which were distributed throughout 31 provinces (cities, counties) of China with a total scale of operations of 64.53 million hectares [9]. The main task is to cultivate and protect ecological public welfare forests [3,4,5]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion