The impact of collective forestland tenure reform on the forest economic effciency of farmers in Zhejiang province

Abstract

The impact of collective forestland tenure reform on farmers' economic effciency in the collective forest areas was assessed. Both technical effciency and scale effciency of farmer households were calculated using the output-oriented bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach along with a household effciency model that incorporates the survey data from 243 farmer households. The DEA results show that a substantial economic ineffciency for farmers exists, which renders a high prospect of improving economic effciency. The findings from the empirical regression of the data also show that the collective forestland tenure reform is quite beneficial for the farmer households, particularly for those with distinguished commercial forest types. The tenure reform has a very influential impact on the effciency of the farmers managing timber forests and bamboo forests, and so do the policies of reform for forestland circulation, forest-cutting quotas, forestland loan, and technical training. However, the cooperation arrangement currently is still not strong enough to influence economic effciency. Based on the regression findings, together with the survey, a number of policy suggestions are put forward to the policy makers for improving economic effciencies for international communities in the process of forestland tenure devolution.