Oasis agriculture in arid areas faces the constraints of scarce resources and a fragile ecological environment. Improving agricultural production efficiency is the key solution. However, there are few studies analyzing the relationship between farmers’ production efficiency and planting scale from a micro-empirical perspective. Herein, we study the seed-producing corn growers in Zhangye city, and supplement special survey data with national input–output survey data. We use data envelopment analysis to measure agricultural production efficiency, and tobit regression to calculate the marginal effects of factors affecting production efficiency on farms of different scales. The results show that production efficiency is greater for large-scale farmers than for small-scale farmers. Duration of technical training, education time of laborers, planting income, and productive expenditure are significantly positively correlated with production efficiency. Average age of farmers and the amount of pesticide and fertilizer use are significantly negatively correlated with production efficiency. Off-farm activities improve the production efficiency of small-scale farmers but inhibit it for medium- and large-scale farmers. Differences exist in marginal impacts for different scales of farmland. We conclude that expanding the scale of family farms and optimizing human capital are effective for improving agricultural production efficiency in arid oasis areas.
Land expropriation has always been a hot spot of social conflicts. The land expropriation policy of Merging Villages and Living Together (MVLT) in rural areas has intensified conflicts due to insufficient financial compensation and “demolishing old houses before building new ones”. The current research most simply assesses the degree of conflict and the influencing factors but rarely includes farmers, governments at all levels, the strength of policy tools, and policy perceptions in a unified quantitative research framework, which is not conducive to conflict resolution and policy improvement. This paper adopts the institutional credibility theory, incorporates the policy instruments of higher-level governments, administrative instruments of lower-level governments, and farmers’ credibility of policies into a unified accounting framework, constructs a conflict stress index, evaluates the role of each subject’s characteristics, policy perceptions, and policy instruments in the process of conflict generation and resolution, and analyzes the methods of conflict resolution from the perspective of different stakeholder conflicts. The theoretical analysis framework and the quantitative analysis of the indicators are verified by using a case study of MVLT policy in Shandong Province, China. The results show that the credibility of the policy of “village integration” is influenced by individual characteristics and varies significantly. The administrative means and different combinations of lower-level government are significantly related to an increase in farmers’ credibility, which can significantly improve the success rate of policy implementation. The effect of administrative means of higher-level government on the credibility of farmers is limited. The highest value of the conflict index was observed when the administrative instruments reached the maximum value without a marginal increase in farmers’ credibility. Based on the quantitative evaluation of conflict generation and resolution mechanisms, recommendations for policy implementation and improvement were made.
Cities enhance the efficiency of green development among themselves through their borrowing population, economic activities density and advanced functions, but the positive green effect of the borrowing size is affected by the city size. Using panel data of 280 prefecture-level cities in China for the period 2009–2019, this paper measures the borrowing size in three dimensions, namely the borrowing population size, borrowing economic activity density and borrowing advanced functions, and uses the super efficiency slacks-based measure (SBM) model, including non-desired outputs, to measure the urban green development efficiency. After that, this paper empirically examines the effect of the borrowing size on the urban green development efficiency in the Chinese urban network using a double-fixed-effect model. A panel threshold regression with city size as the threshold variable is conducted to evaluate the nonlinear relationship quantitatively between the borrowing size and urban green development efficiency. The results show that all three dimensions of the borrowing size have positive effects on the urban green development efficiency. There is a significant double-threshold effect between the borrowing size and urban green development efficiency; under the threshold of the city size, there is a U-shaped relationship between the borrowing population size, borrowing advanced functions and urban green development efficiency, whereas there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between the borrowing economic activity density and urban green development efficiency. Accordingly, this paper argues that government should pay attention to the role of the borrowing size in promoting urban green development efficiency and reasonably expand the city size.
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