Abstract:

The purpose of the paper is to study provincial and regional farmland conversion efficiencies and their changes in China from 2000 to 2008, in order to provide references for optimizing land use. Methods of DEA model and Malmquist TFP index were employed. The results indicated that: (1) on provincial level, average efficiencies of farmland conversion were not high, and more than 80% of the provincial regions have not yet achieved validity in comprehensive efficiency; (2) farmland conversion efficiencies basically showed the trend of eastern regions> northeast regions> central regions> western regions, and regional difference has decreased; (3) the rise of average comprehensive efficiency of farmland conversion on provincial level was mainly due to the contribution of pure technical efficiency, and the significant improvement of production efficiency benefited from technical change; (4) the comprehensive efficiency of farmland conversion of eastern and northeast regions has decreased, while that of central and western regions has increased, with significant rise in western regions. The study found that: at the present stage, there is insufficient utilization of farmland conversion input in China, and the potential for efficiency enhancement is huge; there is a large gap in the ability of scale concentration between western regions and other regions; eastern regions are facing efficiency loss in farmland conversion; although farmland conversion efficiencies in central and western regions has increased significantly, whether it could be used as the evidence for increasing farmland conversion quota needs further research.