How land transfer affects agricultural land use efficiency: Evidence from China's agricultural sector

In recent years, China's agricultural land has decreased year by year. In order to alleviate the shortage of land and improve the efficiency of land use, the state has successively issued a number of relevant policies to encourage the transfer of agricultural land management rights. In this context, based on the data of 30 provinces from 2000 to 2017, this paper uses the global data envelopment method to establish indicators to evaluate the agricultural land efficiency, and uses the PSM method to construct a counterfactual framework to analyze the impact of the land transfer on agricultural land efficiency. This paper draws the following conclusions: 1) the national average value of land use efficiency is low, only 0.288, showing a decreasing trend from the east to the central and west. 2) The provinces that transfer land in are more efficient in land use than the ones with land transfer out, which further illustrates the seriousness of agricultural land tension in China. Also, this result testifies that increasing agricultural arable land can bring about a scale effect, which increases the output of unit land, while the outflow of land reduces the income of agricultural workers. This means that the land transfer in recent years is actually at the expense of agricultural operator?s interests. At last, this paper put some policy implications from the perspective of the land-use system reform, urban-rural transformation, and rural revitalization in China.