中国省域农户土地经营规模与地区专业化实证分析

Household farmland area and regional specialization:An empirical analysis at provincial level

中国农地利用的地区专业化水平明显落后于西方发达国家,对其农产品国际竞争力产生了重要影响。农户土地经营规模不足被认为是造成这一现象的主要原因。但是这种观念主要来自于定性分析和经验总结,缺乏针对两者关系的实证检验。本文采用赫芬达尔专业化指数,利用农作物种植面积数据和农户土地经营规模数据,在省域尺度上检验农户土地经营规模与地区专业化的关系。结果显示,扩大农户土地经营规模既不是地区专业化的充分条件也不是必要条件。空间维度上,规模越大的地区,其专业化水平并非越高,各年份两变量的秩相关系数均很小;时间维度上,随着规模的上升(或下降),其专业化水平不一定随之上升(或下降),29个省域样本中仅有12个省区两变量的时间序列呈显著正相关。农户土地经营规模仅对部分地区的专业化水平有一定影响且与区域优势作物类型有关。结果表明,仅依靠扩大农户土地经营规模,并不能有效提高地区专业化水平,要提高中国农地利用专业化水平必须寻找其他有效途径。

China lags behind most of the developed countries in regional specialization of agricultural production. This backwardness has weakened its competitiveness of agricultural products in world market. It is generally recognized that household farmland area has been the key limiting factor, but it stemmed from qualitative analyses or experiences and lacked supports of empirical analyses. In this paper, we examined the relationship between household farmland area （HFA） and regional specialization at provincial level based on the specialization index of Hirschman-Herfindahl （SHHI） and agricultural statistical data. The data included planting area of crops and per capita area of land managed by households. The results suggested that enlargement of HFA was neither a sufficient condition nor even a necessary one for regional specialization. But it helped. In spatial dimension, the provinces with larger HFA were not at a higher level of specialization inevitably. The rank correlation coefficients between HFA and SHHI were not significant in the period from 2002 to 2012. In temporal dimension, SHHI did not increase or decrease with the HFA in most of the sample provinces. There were only 12 of the 29 sample provinces whose SHHI correlated significantly with HFA. The 12 provinces were those where major crops were more land-intensive. These results implied that enlargement of household farmland area can not improve regional specialization inevitably in China. There is a need for other effective ways to enforce China＇s regional specialization of agricultural production.