Technical Efficiency, Ecological Efficiency and Grassland Ecological Performance of Grazing in China

Incorporating the ecological variable of grassland Net Primary Productivity (NPP) into the production function - to be representative of grassland quality - is a new step toward the ecological efficiency analysis under the field of productivity and efficiency analysis. We measure the technical efficiency, ecological performance indicator and ecological efficiency of grazing using a multi-outputs and multi-inputs stochastic input-oriented distance function. The average technical efficiency is estimated to be 0.90 when taking grassland NPP into account, implying that cost of grazing inputs can be decreased by 10% without any deduction of outputs. The ecological efficiency is estimated to be 0.83 and the average ecological performance indicator is 0.17.