A Study on Land Use Efficiency of State-Owned Agricultural Land in China’s State Farms: An Empirical Analysis Based on the Super-SBM Model

Against the backdrop of increasing resource and environmental constraints, improving the land use efficiency of state-owned agricultural land is of great significance for promoting sustainable agricultural development. This study measures the land use efficiency of state-owned agricultural land across 29 provinces in China based on data from the China State Farms Statistical Yearbook (2019–2023). The super-efficiency slack-based measure model (Super-SBM), incorporating both desirable and undesirable outputs, is employed, and global and local spatial autocorrelation methods are further applied to analyze the spatiotemporal evolution of land use efficiency. The results indicate the following: (1) from 2019 to 2023, the overall land use efficiency of state-owned agricultural land in China remained below or slightly above the efficiency frontier, exhibiting a fluctuating trend characterized by an initial increase followed by a decline; (2) significant regional disparities exist, with high-efficiency areas mainly concentrated in Northeast China and the eastern coastal regions, while low-efficiency areas are primarily distributed in western regions and parts of central China; (3) spatial autocorrelation analysis reveals that land use efficiency shows an increasingly pronounced spatial clustering pattern at the provincial scale. After 2022, high–high and low–low clustering became more evident, although a certain degree of spatial heterogeneity still persists overall. These findings provide empirical evidence for understanding the spatial differentiation and evolutionary patterns of the land use efficiency of state-owned agricultural land and offer useful insights for optimizing land resource allocation and management.