The change of Chinese agricultural productivity

Abstract

Adopting Stochastic Frontier Analysis and employing 1995-2009 village-level data, the paper evaluates and interprets the effect of China's agricultural policy reform on agricultural productivity change in the past fifteen years. The results show that China's agricultural productivity has made significant growth in the past fifteen years under the influence of China's agricultural policy reform. Furthermore, the effects of different agricultural policies on technical change and technical efficiency have significant differences with obvious periodic and regional features. Meanwhile compared with technical change, technical efficiency has a smaller contribution to the improvement of China's agricultural productivity. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.