Impact of grassland transfer on technical efficiency of livestock production in Northern China

ABSTRACT

This paper estimates the impact of grassland transfer on the technical efficiency of livestock production, using the cross-sectional data collected from herders in Northern China. The propensity score matching approach and selectivity-corrected stochastic production frontier model are employed to address the selection bias issues. The empirical results show that, on average, the average technical efficiency score of herders with grassland transfer is significantly higher than that of herders without grassland transfer, which are 0.56 and 0.41, respectively, after addressing both observed and unobserved selection biases. The livestock revenue is positively and significantly affected by forage grass use, machinery use, stocking rate, family and hired labours use, and veterinary investment. Our findings highlight the importance of facilitating grassland transfer to increase livestock production efficiency and boost farm performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Grassland transfer
• technical efficiency
• selection bias
• herders
• China

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D61
• Q15

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Acknowledgments

Xiaolong Feng acknowledges the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72003182). Huanguang Qiu acknowledges the research fund support for the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 42061124002) and the Chinese Academy of Engineering (2021-HZ-5).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [72003182; 42061124002]; the Chinese Academy of Engineering [2021-HZ-5].