Abstract:Farmland transfer and its use right confirmation are crucial for small-scale farmers’ access to modern agriculture. Based on a survey data of 612 rural households in Henan Province, this paper adopts the stochastic frontier production function to calculate the technical efficiency of wheat production and the Tobit model to examine the effect on technical efficiency exerted by farmland transfer and reallocation and their interactions. In addition, this paper also attempts to solve the endogenous problems of farmland transfer by adopting the method of instrumental variable. Results show that the average technical efficiency of the sample is 0.810 and there is still a greater potential for improvement. The heterogeneity of the technical efficiency of wheat production is obvious and there are great differences among different farmers. The technical efficiency of wheat production of those households with farmland transfers is higher than that of the households without farmland transfers. Whether with or without farmland transfer, the technical efficiency of wheat production of those households without land reallocation is higher than that of the households with land reallocation. Through the joint inspection of farmland transfer and land reallocation, this paper finds that farmland transfer has a positive regulating effect on the technical efficiency, whereas farmland reallocation exerts a negative effect on the technical efficiency. Farmland transfer, to a certain extent, can cut the losses of the technical efficiency caused by farmland transfer. The age of household head, the role of a village leader, agricultural technical training, the distance from irrigation water, and agricultural disasters have obvious effects on the technical efficiency. Accordingly, this paper suggests to accelerate the transfer of farmland, to speed up the process of scale production and modernization of farmland, to consolidate the result of farmland use right confirmation, and to enhance agricultural skill training and the construction of farmland water conservation projects.