In this paper we fit stochastic frontier production functions to data for Chinese farms
grouped into each of four regions—North, Northeast, East, and Southwest—over 1995-1999.
These frontier production functions are shown to have statistically different structures, and the
marginal product information shows overuse of chemical inputs in the East and capital services
in the North. Labor also has a low marginal product. Next, we use the data and the production
parameters to create technical efficiency scores for each of the farms and then standardize them.
Standardized technical efficiency is shown to have the same structure across regions and to be
related to the age of the farmer, land fragmentation, and the village migration rate, controlling for
year dummies and village or regional fixed effects.