Abstract: Rice farming is important for income generation and poverty reduction in large parts of China. The high degree of land fragmentation, however, may constitute a major bottleneck to increasing productivity and reducing poverty. This paper applies detailed household, crop and plot level data to investigate the impact of land fragmentation on rice producers’ technical efficiency in a major rice growing area of Southeast China, using a stochastic frontier model. Average technical efficiency scores are 0.85 for early rice, 0.83 for late rice, and 0.79 for one-season rice production in our research area. This indicates that with the existing technologies, a considerable productivity improvement can still be reached by addressing the factors constraining technical efficiency increases. Land consolidation can be an important option in this respect, as average plots size is found to have a significant positive impact on technical efficiency for all three types of rice.

Key words: Stochastic frontier function, Technical efficiency, Rice production, Southeast China, Land fragmentation