Technical efficiency and the impact of grassland use right leasing on livestock grazing on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

Abstract

This paper reviews changes in grassland property rights and measures the efficiency of livestock grazing on China’s Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau, where there is an extensive nomadic grazing system. A cross sectional data set from a field survey of 197 livestock grazing households is used to develop a stochastic translog distance function and technical inefficiency model; variables for livestock intensity and property rights are incorporated. The overall average technical efficiency of the extensive livestock grazing is estimated to be 0.62, lower than the value of 0.67 found for households who rent-in grassland. The results indicate that renting-in grassland improves the technical efficiency of livestock grazing significantly. Both household size and livestock intensity have an effect on technical efficiency, especially the dummy variable of whether the summer pasture is near the winter pasture. This may indicate that grassland fragmentation would be not ideal for extensive livestock production on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau.