退耕还林生态补偿机制的激励有效性——基于异质性农户视角

Incentive Effectiveness of Ecological Compensation Mechanism for Grain-to-Green Project:From the Perspective of Heterogeneous Farmers

以异质性农户为切入点,分别对农户的退耕行为与还林行为进行重新审视,剖析退耕还林政策实施的内在机制障碍,深入研究农户个体差异导致的激励不足和激励错位问题;在此基础上,提出中国退耕还林生态补偿政策的调整方向与优化路径:短期内,提高退耕补助额或尝试多样化的补贴政策以激励农户的参与积极性,中长期则需要拓宽非农就业渠道和发展林业碳汇市场来保证退耕还林工程的可持续性。

Background At present,Grain-to-Green project is the biggest ecological project in China,it plays an important role in improving ecological environment.In academia field,many scholars believed in an opinion that returning stage had a strong intensive and planting stage had a weak intensive.Methods Base on the present literatures and the theories of heterogeneity,this paper analyzed four aspects as the real obstacles of mechanism of returning farmland to forest policy,the problems of insufficient incentive,the incentive misalignment caused by the neglect of heterogeneous farmers and their different preferences from the perspective of heterogeneous farmers.Results Heterogeneous farmers were defined as the difference in agricultural production efficiency caused by concurrent industrialization,which actually includes economic effect and ecological effect.In such a context,farm households' decision making was determined by the tradeoffs among subsidy,agriculture income and nonfarm income.Farmers would prefer to return farmland when government subsidy was higher than agricultural income,conversely,they would prefer engaging in agricultural activities.However,if the non-farm income was far above government subsidy and agricultural income,farmers would chose returning farmland again.The agricultural income as the opportunity cost was used to evaluate the incentive effectiveness.The result shows that the relationship between heterogeneous farmers measured by concurrent level and the willingness to participate in Grain-to-Green project is a hump.Specifically,both of the pure farmers and farmers who had abandoned farming have the incentives to return farmland,the difference is that for the former they have moral hazard problem of forest rehabilitation,and the latter induced policy burden; the choices of part-time farmers were determined by the net values of different land usage and the trade-off between farm income and non-farm income.Therefore,the Grain-to-Green policy may encounter failure even during the returning stage.Farmers with high production efficiency could afford the expensive switching cost,so the economic forest would be their best choice after the returning stage.Otherwise,ecological forest came to be the second best choice for someone who had lower efficiency.And the ecological performance achieved by the Grain-to-Green policy was due to the rational behaviors of heterogeneous farmers.In the stage of returning,if subsidy policy palled on farmers who was in intervening level of concurrent business that Grain-to-Green project would play a finite role in improving ecological environment.And in the stage of planting,the farmers who had high production efficiency would choose economic forest first,exhibiting highly motivated in forest administration and protection.However,the farmers with higher efficiency will increase the investment in pesticides and chemical fertilizer for the sake of economic interest.So the overall effect of ecological improvement is vague.Conclusions and Discussion Finally,this paper proposed the adjustment and optimization of the ecological compensation policies in China,including the increase of subsidies or the trial of diversified subsidy policy to encourage and protect farmers participation incentives in the short run; broadening the non-farm employment channels and developing forestry carbon sink market to ensure the sustainability of Sloping-Land Conversion Program in the medium and long term.