The Impact of Collective Forestland Tenure Reform on the Forest Economic Efficiency of Farmers in Zhejiang Province

Lin Liu and Honggang Sun
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Lin Liu: Economic and Management School, China Jiliang University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Honggang Sun: Research Institute of Subtropical Forestry, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Hangzhou 311400, China

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 8, 1-15

Abstract: The impact of collective forestland tenure reform on farmers’ economic efficiency in the collective forest areas was assessed. Both technical efficiency and scale efficiency of farmer households were calculated using the output-oriented bootstrapped data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach along with a household efficiency model that incorporates the survey data from 243 farmer households. The DEA results show that a substantial economic inefficiency for farmers exists, which renders a high prospect of improving economic efficiency. 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 efficiency 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 efficiency. Based on the regression findings, together with the survey, a number of policy suggestions are put forward to the policy makers for improving economic efficiencies for international communities in the process of forestland tenure devolution.

Keywords: collective forestland; data envelopment analysis; efficiency; household management (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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