Economies of scale, plot size, human capital, and productivity in Chinese agriculture

The authors test hypotheses on economies of scale, diseconomies of multiple plots, and multiple crops and derive estimates of their impact on total factor productivity and the marginal products of labor and other inputs. The data are derived from a survey of 1,200 farm households. They model a Cobb-Douglas production function for agricultural output, incorporating the potentially negative influence of multiple plots on total factor productivity. They suggest that plot and crop consolidation within households could increase China's agriculture productivity considerably - more than the best year of productivity growth during the heyday of agricultural reform during the early 1980s. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)
It is widely accepted that China successfully carried out an economic reform of agriculture between 1979 and 1985. As described in Bruce L. Reynolds |1~, Chinese agricultural output grew at [...]