Farmland system, farmland scale management and agricultural growth - an empirical study from Heilongjiang province

The enhancement of agricultural production performance is largely due to the implementation of household contract responsibility system since the reform and opening up. With the deepen industrialization and urbanization and persistent economic growth in China, whether household contract responsibility system which is characterized mainly with decentralized management is still beneficial to agricultural growth becomes an important issue. By using GLS technology and ARMA to analyze the agricultural data from Heilongjiang, the paper finds that household contract responsibility system has not significant impact on agricultural outcome, and farmland scale economy has significant impact on performance of agricultural production. The research results indicate that speeding up the transfer of land and adding land scale economy in appropriate areas can improve the performance of agricultural production. In addition, through analyzing the cross-sectional data from other provinces in China, this study finds that the scale economy of farmland is not the most important influencing factors, and institutional factor still has an important impact.