A generalized maximum entropy approach is adapted to empirically estimate crop‐specific production technologies in Chinese agriculture. Despite a modest behavioral assumption about equal marginal returns of nonland inputs among crops, this method does not require price information, which is usually distorted in a centrally planned economy such as China. A multi‐output technology for Chinese agriculture is estimated and input allocations for each province are recovered simultaneously. The estimated multi‐output production technology and input allocations imply that China may have greater grain production potentials than previously thought.
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Zhang et al. (2001) studied this question.